“This is not just a military operation against the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, but also a long-term occupation of Iraqi territories,” says Yuhanna, a Christian farmer from an Assyrian village near the border with Turkey. .
The permanent military presence in Iraq was prepared by the Turkish army: Yuhanna witnessed the felling of trees, the leveling of the land and the displacement of six hundred people from the villages in the area. The air and ground bombings have not yet stopped and hit the areas close to the inhabited communities, causing widespread fires.
Turkey has not only militarily penetrated the region: it has also altered ecosystems and the environment, as the agriculture ministries of the Kurdish region and the Iraqi central government said in a joint statement.
In an exchange of statements between the two sides, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that the Iraqi government would cooperate in the operation. The Baghdad government not only denied, but also strongly condemned the Ankara operation and summoned the Turkish ambassador to express his dissent through institutional channels.
“Erdoğan is trying to return to the typical occupations of the old Ottoman Empire,” former Iraqi MP Josef Slaywa said in a tweet. “The Turkish army uses the pretext of fighting terrorism to disguise its true aims, that is, the ambition to regain control over the province of Mosul, which Ankara lost definitively in 1926”.
(Translation by Francesco De Lellis)