Iraqi army downs Turkish military drone over Baghdad-administered territory

The Iraqi army shot down an armed Turkish drone over a city in northern Iraq on Thursday, military officials revealed.  

According to law enforcement and army sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the unmanned aerial vehicle was downed over the city's central district, damaging a house and injuring a worker at a nearby construction site. The injured individual was admitted to a local hospital for treatment.  

General Abdel Salam Ramadan, the deputy air defense commander of Iraq’s regional force, confirmed the interception in a press conference with reporters on Thursday.  “A Turkish drone that penetrated Iraqi airspace has been shot down” and had come “from the direction of Sulaymaniyah,” a city in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region.  

Home to a diverse population of Kurds, Iraqi Turkmen, and Arabs, Kirkuk borders Iraqi Kurdistan to the south and is located roughly 147 miles (238 kilometers) north of Baghdad. While Ankara regularly carries out cross-border operations against armed Kurdish groups in northern Iraq, Kirkuk, which serves as the provincial capital of the oil-rich governorate of the same name, is directly administered by the federal government.  

Turkey's campaign against the PKK

Turkey's decades-long military campaign against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is designated as a terrorist organization by Ankara and its Western allies, has led to the establishment of dozens of semi-official bases in northern Iraq. Baghdad has historically viewed Turkey's incursions as violations of sovereignty, but the two governments recently agreed to cooperate on counterinsurgency efforts targeting the PKK and its allies.