Washington Kurdish Institute
August 21, 2020
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long made his disdain for international law clear, through both his persecution of Turkey’s citizens at home and his various unprovoked campaigns of military aggression outside of Turkey’s borders. Turkish military aggression has known no bounds. Over recent years, Turkey has repeatedly bombed Sinjar in northern Iraq, inflicting further devastation on the heartland of the Yazidi minority still recovering from genocide at the hands of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group. Further south in Iraq, not far from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s administrative capital of Hewler (Erbil), Turkey has repeatedly struck the Makhmour Refugee Camp, an UNHCR refugee camp that is home to over 12,000 Kurds who fled Turkish persecution decades ago. Meanwhile, in Syria, the Turkish military has killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in the Kurdish majority Afrin region and along the Turkey-Syria border, and Turkey continues to occupy these areas in coordination with militant jihadist proxy groups and forcibly change their demographics. Furthermore, having established a zone of occupation in parts of northern Syria that were once among the most peaceful in the country, Turkey is now exporting jihadist fighters from Syria to Libya to fan the flames of that country’s civil war as well.
Earlier this month, on August 11, Turkey broadened the scope of their campaign of violent expansion and occupation by using a military drone to kill two Iraqi security officers, General Mohammad Rashid Goran and Brigadier General Zubeir Hali Bradosti, in the Bradost area of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) near Iraq’s borders with Iran and Turkey. It should not be surprising that the Turkish Armed Forces, which time and time again have shown the utmost disregard for human rights and human life, also have no respect for the basic concept of sovereignty. While Turkey routinely kills Iraqi Kurdish civilians under the pretence of “fighting terrorism”, this marks the first time that the Turkish military has killed Iraqi security officers, both of whom were Kurds and both with senior ranks within the Iraqi border guard forces, a part of the Iraqi army.
The Iraqi central government has condemned this deadly strike and once again delivered a formal note of protest to Turkey concerning Turkish military attacks on Iraq. The international community remains, for the most part, silent concerning this new milestone in Turkish military aggression. Continued silence will encourage Turkey to expand their campaign of military expansion and occupation, further destabilising the region and provoking an opportunity for ISIS and other jihadist groups, including those funded by Turkey who are working directly with the Turkish military in Syria and Libya, to threaten regional and global security.