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8 killed in Turkish air strikes in northern Iraq

Xinhua, August 1, 2015 Adjust font size:

Eight people were killed and 10 wounded on Saturday in air strikes by Turkish warplanes on targets of the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) at a village in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, an official Kurdish website reported.

"The Turkish warplanes violated the airspace of Kurdistan region in the early morning and bombarded villages in Qandil mountain which left eight citizens and PKK fighters killed and 10 others wounded," said the official website of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a major Kurdish party in which the Iraqi President Fuad Masoum is a leading figure.

Most of the human casualties occurred in the village of Zarkeli in Rawanduz area in east of the regional capital city of Arbil, which located some 350 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, the website said.

Turkey recently launched an offensive against Islamic State (IS) militants and PKK rebels, including air strikes and artillery shelling against them in Syria and Iraq.

On July 24, Turkish jets bombed northern Iraq for the first time in the last two-and-a-half years, after a peaceful settlement for the Kurdish issue in Turkey was reached between Ankara and the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan in March 2013. Endit