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A drone attack on a small airport killed three members of an elite Iraqi Kurdish counterterrorism task force that operates in the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq.<\/p>\n
Three task force members were also wounded in the attack on the airport, which is about 17 miles southeast of Sulaymaniyah, the second largest city in Kurdistan.<\/p>\n
Turkey and more recently Iran have targeted Kurdish militants from their countries who shelter in Iraq\u2019s Kurdistan region.<\/p>\n
The airport, mostly used by small agricultural planes for spraying pesticides, was recently repurposed to also be used as a training camp for Kurdish counterterrorism forces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The elite forces were focused primarily on Islamic State fighters in recent years, but other Islamic militant groups now also move through Iraq\u2019s porous borders with Iran and Turkey.<\/p>\n
The Iraqi government announced early on Tuesday that the drone was launched by Turkey and called on Ankara to halt such attacks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis aggression constitutes a violation of Iraq\u2019s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity,\u201d said Maj. Gen. Yahya Rasoul Abdullah, military spokesman for the prime minister, \u201cThese repeated attacks are not consistent with the principle of good neighborly relations between countries, and threaten to undermine Iraq\u2019s efforts to build good and balanced political, economic, and security relations with its neighbors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kurdish leaders, whose territory is routinely targeted by Turkey, used angrier rhetoric.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis criminal act is an open trespassing of the border of the Kurdistan Region and of Iraq, and it is part of the conspiracy aimed at disturbing the peace and stability of the Kurdistan Region,\u201d said Bafel Talabani, president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main political parties in Kurdistan and the dominant one in Sulaymaniyah.<\/p>\n
Turkey has been particularly aggressive in using drone attacks to target an insurgent Turkish-Kurdish group, the P.K.K., regularly bombing sites in Iraqi Kurdistan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In April, a similar drone attack happened near the international airport in Sulaymaniyah, but there were no casualties. Turkey denied responsibility for that attack.<\/p>\n
Lt. Gen. Jabbar Yawar, the former minister of the Peshmerga, the Kurdistan region\u2019s military force, said the attack on Monday followed the pattern of Turkey\u2019s previous ones.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe daily record violations by Turkey on our borders, and we do not know when these attacks will stop and when the central government would intervene to end these intrusions,\u201d he said in an interview, adding that in 2023 alone, security officials had tracked more than 200 times that Turkey had either tried to breach or had breached Iraqi territory.<\/p>\n