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Sinjar on brink of major conflict between PKK, Turkey

The city of Sinjar, west of Mosul, seems close to becoming a battleground for armed confrontations between the PKK and the Turkish army, especially after Ankara called for ground intervention against PKK fighters in Sinjar to prevent them from having a new base in the north of Iraq.
Bullets lie next to a gun at a Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) check point, a militia affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in the village of Umm al-Dhiban, northern Iraq, April 30, 2016. They share little more than an enemy and struggle to communicate on the battlefield, but together two relatively obscure groups have opened up a new front against Islamic State militants in a remote corner of Iraq. The unlikely alliance between the Sinjar Resistance Units, an offshoot of a leftist Kurdish organ

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq — In a May 8 meeting with the Turkish ambassador in Baghdad, Iraqi Vice President and prominent Sunni leader Osama al-Nujaifi said that the role of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Iraq is destructive and the PKK is a threat to the region, just as the Islamic State is.

Iraqi officials and authorities have been stressing the need for diplomacy to deal with any Turkish intervention in Iraq following April 25 air raids by Turkish forces on the PKK headquarters in the Sinjar Mountains. However, Sinjar District member of parliament Majed Sinjari did not rule out armed confrontations between the two sides should Turkey hit Iraqi territory in the future.

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