BEIRUT: Turkish warplanes launched a new round of airstrikes against Kurdish militant targets in Iraq on Wednesday hours after the foreign minister warned that Turkiye would hit the militant group’s positions in Syria and Iraq in retaliation for a suicide bombing in Ankara earlier this week.
The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack outside the Interior Ministry in Ankara in which one attacker blew himself up and another would-be bomber was killed in a shootout with police. Two police were wounded in the attack.
The Turkish jets targeted 22 suspected PKK positions in northern Iraq on Wednesday, destroying caves, shelters and depots used by the militants, the Turkish defense ministry said. The PKK maintains bases in the region, where its leadership has a foothold.
It was the Turkish air force’s third airstrike against suspected Kurdish militant sites in northern Iraq following the attack, which came as parliament prepared to reopen after a long summer recess. Meanwhile, dozens of people suspected of links to the PKK have been detained in a series of raids across Turkiye.
Ankara said a large number of PKK militants were “neutralized” in the strikes.
There was no immediate comment from Kurdish officials in Iraq.
Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told a news conference that Turkish intelligence officials have established that the two assailants arrived from Syria, where they had been trained. He said Turkiye would now target facilities in Syria and Iraq belonging to the PKK, or its affiliated Kurdish militia group in Syria, which is known as People’s Defense Units, or YPG.
“From now on, all infrastructure, superstructure and energy facilities belonging to the PKK or the YPG in Iraq and Syria are legitimate targets of our security forces, armed forces and intelligence elements,” Fidan said. “Our armed forces’ response to this terrorist attack will be extremely clear and they will regret committing such an act.”
A Syrian Kurdish commander denied on Wednesday that the Ankara attackers were trained in Syria or crossed into Turkiye from Syria.
Mazloum Abdi, the commander of the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Force that controls large parts of northeastern Syria tweeted that those who carried out the attack in Ankara “did not pass through our territories.”
The Syrian Kurdish-led force is a coalition of several factions, including the YPG.
“We are not a side in the internal conflict in Turkiye,” Abdi wrote. He added that Turkiye is looking “for a pretext to legitimatize its continuous attacks on our region and to launch a new aggression and this is raising our concerns.”
Abdi, who is wanted by Turkiye on terrorism charges, said that targeting the infrastructure and economic targets in northeast Syria and cities “is considered a war crime.”
Fidan later joined a previously unannounced security meeting with Turkiye’s interior minister, defense minister, top military commander and intelligence chief, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
Iraqi Defense Minister Thabet Muhammad Al-Abbasi was scheduled to visit Turkiye on Thursday, the agency also reported.
The PKK has led a decades-long insurgency in Turkiye and is considered a terror organization by the United States and the European Union. Tens of thousands of people have died since the start of the conflict in 1984.
Meanwhile, Turkish intelligence agents killed a wanted Kurdish militant in an operation in Syria, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported Wednesday.
The militant, identified as Nabo Kele Hayri, who also went by Mazlum Afrin, was wanted for his alleged role in planning an attack last year on Istanbul’s main pedestrian street, Istiklal. The attack killed six people.
Turkiye strikes Kurdish militants in Iraq again after warning of retaliation for Ankara bombing
https://arab.news/46smv
Turkiye strikes Kurdish militants in Iraq again after warning of retaliation for Ankara bombing
- The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack outside the Interior Ministry in Ankara
- The Turkish jets targeted 22 suspected PKK positions in northern Iraq on Wednesday
Women main victims of Sudan conflict abuses: minister to AFP
- Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF
- Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025
PORT SUDAN: Women are the main victims of abuse in Sudan’s war, facing “the world’s worst” sexual violence and other crimes committed with impunity, a rights activist turned social affairs minister for the army-backed government told AFP.
The Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced around 11 million and been marked by widespread sexual violence.
Sulaima Ishaq Al-Khalifa said abuses against women routinely accompanied looting and attacks, with reports of rape often perpetrated as “the family witnessed” the crime.
“There is no age limit. A woman of 85 could be raped, a child of one year could be raped,” the trained psychologist told AFP at her home in Port Sudan.
The longtime women’s rights activist, recently appointed to the government, said that women were also being subjected to sexual slavery and trafficked to neighboring countries, alongside forced marriages arranged to avoid shame.
Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF, who she says use it “as a weapon of war” and for the purposes of “ethnic cleansing.”
Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025 — a figure that does not include atrocities documented in western Darfur and the neighboring Kordofan region from late October onwards.
“It’s about... humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking... the social fabrics,” Khalifa said.
“When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend... the war forever,” because it feeds a “sense of revenge,” she added.
- ‘War crimes’ -
A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuses against women in the Horn of Africa, found that more than three-quarters of recorded cases involved rape, with 87 percent attributed to the RSF.
The United Nations has repeatedly raised alarm over what it describes as targeted attacks on non?Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a formal investigation into “war crimes” by both sides.
Briefing the UN Security Council in mid-January, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators had uncovered evidence of an “organized, calculated campaign” in El-Fasher — the army’s last stronghold in Darfur captured by the RSF in late October.
The campaign, Khan added, involved mass rapes and executions “on a massive scale,” sometimes “filmed and celebrated” by the perpetrators and “fueled by a sense of complete impunity.”
Darfur endured a brutal wave of atrocities in the early 2000s, and a former Janjaweed commander — from the militia structure that later evolved into the RSF — was recently found guilty by the International Criminal Court of multiple war crimes, including rape.
“What’s happening now is much more ugly. Because the mass rape thing is happening and documented,” said Khalifa.
RSF fighters carrying out the assaults “have been very proud about doing this and they don’t see it as a crime,” she added.
“You feel that they have a green light to do whatever they want.”
In Darfur, several survivors said RSF fighters “have been accusing them of being lesser people, like calling them ‘slaves’, and saying that when I’m attacking you, assaulting you sexually, I’m actually ‘honoring’ you, because I am more educated than you, or (of) more pure blood than you.”
- ‘Torture operation’ -
Women in Khartoum and Darfur, including El-Fasher, have described rapes carried out by a range of foreign nationals.
These were “mercenaries from West Africa, speaking French, including from Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, as well as Colombia and Libya” — allegedly fighting alongside the RSF, Khalifa added.
Some victims were abducted and held as sexual slaves, while others were sold through trafficking networks operating across Sudan’s porous borders, said Khalifa.
Many of these cases remain difficult to document because of the collapse of state institutions.
In conservative communities, social stigma also remains a major obstacle to documenting the scale of the abuse.
Families often force victims into marriage to “cover up what happened,” particularly when pregnancies result from rape, according to the minister.
“We call it a torture operation,” she said, describing “frightening” cases in which children and adolescent girls under 18 are forced into marriage.
