By Xinhua
Duhuk, Iraq : The Turkish artillery shelled several Iraqi Kurdish villages near the border early on Sunday, but caused no human casualties, a Kurdish official said.
“The Turkish artillery shelled some 10 Kurdish villages, including the mountains of Mateen, in Duhuk province at about 6:00a.m. (GMT 0200), but there were no casualties,” Aysar Jerjis, mayor of Kani Masi town near the Iraqi-Turkish border, told Xinhua.
“More than 50 rounds of heavy artillery landed on the targeted areas that were located some 80 km northeast of the provincial capital of Duhuk,” Jerjis said.
Ismail Ahmed, mayor of the Amadiyah city, 25 km away from the borders, told Xinhua that up to 500 Iraqi families have been displaced from their villages in the Sarsang area due to the heavy Turkish bombardment a few days ago.
On Sunday afternoon, Turkish warplanes struck a bridge in the Nezdoori village in Batofah area in Duhuk province, destroying the bridge without causing human casualties, a Kurdish security source told Xinhua.
The attacks came four days after the Turkish parliament on Wednesday approved a motion backing a cross-border military operation in northern Iraq to fight against militants of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).
Abdul Rahman al-Jad, head of foreign affairs of the PKK, told a Xinhua correspondent that his fighters “will blow up the oil pipe lines that pass through the Kurdish region to Turkey if the Turkish army continues its operations against the PKK fighters.”
The PKK has increased its attacks on government troops in southeastern Turkey, which led to rising Turkish demands for an incursion into northern Iraq to crush the rebels based there.
The group, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the EU, launched an armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in the mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking decades of strife that has claimed more than 30,000 lives.