Iraq’s Interior Ministry said Friday in a statement that two members of the Iraqi border guards were killed and another wounded in an attack that it said was carried out by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in the area of Zakho, in northwestern Iraq near the borders with Türkiye and Syria.
Iraq last year officially banned the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group that has waged an insurgency against Türkiye since the 1980s and is considered by Ankara to be a terrorist group.
A security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment said the PKK has previously targeted military points of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces and the Iraqi border guards.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan is set to visit Baghdad on Sunday, where he is expected to discuss regional security issues and Turkish military operations against the PKK and affiliated groups.
The US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which have controlled northeast Syria for the past decade, is under attack by the Syrian National Army, an umbrella organization of Turkish-backed armed groups, which regards the SDF as an extension of the PKK.
