Turkey kills PKK leader in Sinjar
A Turkish airstrike has killed a senior leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party in Sinjar, to the dismay of the Iraqi Yazidis the group rescued.
Yazidi communal leaders are reacting with anger to the death of a senior figure in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). He was killed in a Turkish airstrike on Aug. 15, near the town of Kocho in the Yazidi-dominated Sinjar area of Iraq.
Zaki Shingali died when Turkish jets struck the convoy that was carrying him back from a memorial to commemorate one of the most horrendous massacres carried out by the Islamic State (IS) against the beleaguered Yazidis in Kocho on Aug. 15, 2014.
Nadia Murad, a Yazidi activist from Kocho who was held captive by IS and has become the public face of the thousands of Yazidi women who were sexually abused by the jihadis, took to Twitter to air her dismay. “Today is the anniversary of the massacre committed against my village of Kocho. Today Turkey carried out several airstrikes in different locations in Sinjar. Sinjar continues to be a war zone.” Murad asked, “How can Yazidis recover from this genocide or go back home?”
Aug. 15 also marked the 34th anniversary of the launching of the PKK’s armed campaign — initially for Kurdish independence and later autonomy — inside Turkey. The Turkish Armed Forces said it had carried out the operation that “neutralized” Shingali jointly with Turkey’s national spy outfit, the National Intelligence Organization (MIT). The pro-government Turkish media hailed the news. “The PKK’s head has been snapped off,” crowed Star in its front-page headline.
