At least five people were killed and numerous others wounded in Turkish airstrikes on a makeshift hospital in the predominantly Yazidi Sinjar region of Iraq on Tuesday, according to local and diplomatic sources on the ground. The attacks are part of Ankara’s broader military campaign against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) across Iraqi Kurdistan that has displaced thousands of villagers and claimed dozens of civilian lives.
The clinic in the village of Skiniya at the southwestern foot of Sinjar Mountain was totally destroyed in the airstrikes, according to medical workers cited by Agence France-Presse. They initially placed the death toll at three. Several of the victims were reportedly civilians and the rest members of a Yazidi militia known as the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS), which received training from the PKK and is on the Iraqi government’s payroll.
Sikiniye was among a string of Yazidi villages seized by the Islamic State when it rampaged across Iraq murdering thousands of Yazidi men and enslaving the women in what the United Nations has formally labeled a genocide.
Scenes of the airstrikes published by Firat News, a pro-PKK news agency, showed black plumes of smoke rising above a dusty plain and several collapsed buildings.
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