The PKK terrorist group has set fire to an entire village in northern Iraq and blew up ammunition depots in another, Türkiye’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday.
"The terrorists, who entered the villages and used civilians as human shields to launch mortar attacks on Turkish forces, have begun setting forests on fire to avoid detection," the ministry said in a statement on X.
According to the ministry, PKK terrorists detonated depots in the villages of Dergele and Miska, and set the entire village of Dergele ablaze, "realizing they had no escape despite their despicable plans."
The ministry said the Turkish Armed Forces' operations are carried out with great care to avoid harming "innocent civilians, the environment and nature."
It stressed: "No matter what the terrorists do, they will not escape the fate that awaits them."
The ministry also shared footage showing PKK members setting fire to the ammunition depots.
The PKK often hides out in northern Iraq to plot attacks on nearby Türkiye.
The PKK is known to use arson attacks as a sabotage technique, hailed as such by the PKK’s de-facto leader Murat Karayılan. The group was blamed for a series of wildfires that raged across Türkiye’s 52 provinces in the Mediterranean, Aegean, Marmara, Western Black Sea and southeastern Anatolia regions in the summer of 2021, as well. The flames claimed at least eight lives and injured over 1,520 others.
Last year in December, Turkish authorities discovered a PKK plot for sabotage acts in the country. They detained 38 suspects linked to its “sabotage team” that regularly paid the suspects to run reconnaissance on potential targets.
One of the suspects confessed to police that he set fire to marinas in the Aegean resort city of Bodrum in January 2022 in exchange for TL 185,000 ($5,680), which amounted to roughly $10,000 at the time.
Similarly, in October 2020, the PKK claimed an attack where four arsonists linked to the “Children of Fire Initiative” burned forestland in southern Hatay province.
The so-called “initiative” was responsible for many arsons in recent years, and it is known for its close ties to the PKK. It has claimed the environmental destruction they caused was a so-called act of revenge.
The PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union – is responsible for over 40,000 civilian and security personnel deaths in Türkiye during an almost four-decadelong campaign of terror.
Since the 1980s, Türkiye has been carrying out operations both in the country and beyond its borders, including in Iraq and Syria, to root out the terrorist group.
