An Iraqi soldier stands next to a flying national flag.
An Iraqi soldier stands next to a flying national flag.
New Delhi: Iraq on Saturday said that the Turkish government must cease hostilities on its soil and asked it to apologise for what it said was an attack on Sulaymaniyah airport in Iraq’s north.
“Turkey has no legal justification to continue its approach of intimidating civilians under the pretext that forces hostile to it are present on Iraqi soil,” the Iraqi presidency said in a statement.
Taking to Twitter late on Friday, Lawk Ghafuri, head of foreign media affairs for the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), said that a drone attack hit the vicinity of Sulaymaniyah airport on Friday but caused no damage or delays or suspension of flights.
No Turkish Armed Forces operation took place in that region on Friday, a Turkish defence ministry official told Reuters.
Turkey’s armed forces have conducted several large-scale military operations including air strikes over the decades in northern Iraq and northern Syria against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, Islamic State and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The attack claims came a few days after Turkey closed its airspace to aircraft travelling to and from Sulaymaniyah due to what it said was intensified activity there by PKK militants.
In early March, a Turkish drone strike in northern Iraq killed two Yazidi fighters affiliated with the PKK, days after a similar strike killed three other fighters.
The PKK has waged an insurgency in Turkey that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 1984.
With inputs from agencies
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