Turkish fighters bombed U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria in the course of an operation targeting militants engaged in a decades-long struggle against the NATO ally, according to reports.
“[T]errorist targets have been struck with success,” the Turkish military said Tuesday. But the attack also killed Kurdish fighters who are working with the United States in the fight against ISIS.
The killing of U.S.-backed forces by a NATO ally is the latest complication in American efforts to lead an effective fighting force to destroy ISIS as a land-holding terrorist entity. “This is very serious,” a U.S. defense official told Fox.
The attack is the latest demonstration of the diplomatic difficult posed by the counter-ISIS coalition. The most effective local forces in Iraq and Syria are Kurdish fighters. Turkey has a fraught history with the Kurds, an ethnic minority in the region that has produced a violent separatist movement in southern Turkey known as the PKK. The Turkish government has a somewhat better relationship with the Iraqi Kurds, known as the Peshmerga, but they see the Syrian Kurds as an affiliate of the PKK.
The Iraqi Kurds condemned the attack as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. “A base of Peshmerga forces has been bombed,” said Jabar Yawar, the chief of staff for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Peshmerga Ministry, according to Voice of America. “The Iraqi government should meet with their respective Turkish officials to resolve this issue.”
The Peshmerga conceded that some members of the PKK were in the region, however. “PKK has been problematic for the people of the Kurdistan Region and, despite broad calls to withdraw, refuses to leave Sinjar,” the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs said in response to the attack, per Al Jazeera. “PKK must stop destabilizing and escalating tensions in the area to allow life to return to the people of the area.”
Syrian Kurds demanded U.S. protection against Turkish airstrikes.
“Coalition forces must not remain silent against this,” said Salih Muslim, the political leader of the Syrian Kurds, according to the Telegraph.
