A Turkish air raid on a Kurdish area near the Iraq border killed at least 35 people, with the military apparently mistaking smugglers for separatist rebels, officials said Thursday. The Turkish authorities said its warplanes targeted militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on the Iraqi side of the border.
“Thirty-five people were killed and another person wounded in an aerial operation,” the local Sirnak provincial governor’s office said in a statement.
“A crisis centre has been set up in the area and prosecutors and security officers have been sent there,” Governor Vahdettin Ozkan said.
Provincial officials said earlier they had found 23 bodies at the village of Ortasu in Sirnak, according to Ertan Eris, a local councillor of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BPD). Eris told pro-Kurdish Roj TV from the bombing site that the dead were among a group of up to 40 people, ranging in age from 16 to 20, who were engaged in smuggling gas and sugar across the mountain border with Iraq.
