The National Intelligence Organization (MIT) eliminated two PKK members in a pinpoint operation in northern Iraq’s Hakurk region, security sources said Friday.
The terrorists, identified as Hadice Kaya, code-named “Nujiyan Isyan” and Syrian national Heva Kivelçek, code-named “Diljin Azadi,” were carrying instruction notes to attack Turkish military bases, sources said.
The pair was to move by midnight to relay the message of the attack to PKK’s field terrorists before MIT decided to launch a precision strike.
Kaya joined the PKK ranks in 2015 and received armed/ideology training in the Gara region of Iraq. By 2018, she began to serve in the PKK’s formation in Avashin and finally moved to Hakurk.
Kivelçek, hailing from Syria’s Afrin region, was recruited into the PKK in 2015 as a child. She too received arms and assassination training in Gara and Avashin.
The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 and is designated a terrorist organization by Ankara, as well as the United States and the European Union.
Since Turkish operations have driven its domestic presence to near extinction, the PKK has moved a large chunk of its operations to northern Iraq, including a stronghold in the Qandil Mountains, located roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of the Turkish border in Irbil.
Türkiye has, over the past 25 years, operated several dozen military bases in northern Iraq in its war against the PKK, as well as the war against Daesh, which controlled much of the area, in 2014 and 2015, when Ankara was an ally in the U.S.-led anti-Daesh campaign.
Ankara launched Operation Claw-Lock in April 2022, the latest in the string of cross-border "Claw" offensives kicked off in 2019, to demolish terrorist lairs across Metina, Avashin-Basyan, Zap and Gara districts and prevent the formation of a terror corridor along Turkish borders.
