The strikes came after a Syria war monitor said Turkish drone strikes had killed 27 civilians in Syria in a 24-hour military escalation, after an attack on Wednesday at state-run Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) near Ankara, which Turkey said killed five people.
After the Ankara attack, Turkey's defence ministry had announced strikes against sites linked to the PKK in Iraq and Syria.
"A series of Turkish air strikes targeted the Sinjar Resistance Units," a security official told AFP, reporting a total of five people killed, as the PKK claimed Wednesday's attack.
The official spoke from Nineveh province, where Sinjar is located, under cover of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the media.
Speaking under similar ground rules, a second official in Sinjar gave the same toll for the "Turkish aerial bombardments targeting positions of the Sinjar Resistance Units".
In a statement, the anti-terrorist service of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, adjacent to Nineveh, gave a lower toll of "three fighters killed" in Sinjar.
It said the strikes by Turkish drones and warplanes targeted PKK positions.
Turkey frequently carries out ground and air offensives on positions of the PKK -- which has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state -- in northern Iraq, the autonomous Kurdistan region and the mountains of Sinjar.
Turkey has also over the past 25 years operated several dozen military bases in northern Iraq in its war against the PKK.
Kurdish-led Syria force says Turkish strikes kill 12 civilians
Beirut, Lebanon (AFP) Oct 24, 2024 -
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said Thursday that Turkish air strikes killed 12 civilians in northeastern Syria, following a deadly attack on a defence firm near Ankara.
"Over the past hours... a new wave of (Turkish) attacks on northern and eastern Syria" killed "12 civilians, including two children", and wounded 25 others, a statement from the US-backed force said.
"In addition to populated areas, Turkish warplanes and UAVs (drones) targeted bakeries, power stations, oil facilities and (Kurdish) Internal Security Force checkpoints," the statement added, also reporting Turkish shelling.
Turkey launched air strikes on Kurdish militants in Iraq and Syria Wednesday blaming them for an attack that killed five people at a defence firm near Ankara.
A further 22 people were wounded in the attack, which the government said was "very likely" carried out by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Hours later, "an air operation was carried out against terrorist targets in the north of Iraq and Syria," the defence ministry said in a statement.
"A total of 32 targets belonging to the terrorists were successfully destroyed."
The US-backed SDF spearheaded the campaign that dislodged Islamic State group jihadists from their last scraps of Syrian territory in 2019.
Turkey sees the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which dominate the SDF, as an offshoot of the PKK.
Turkish troops and allied rebel factions control swathes of northern Syria following successive cross-border offensives since 2016, most of them targeting the SDF.
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