Turkish Strike in Iraq Kills Six Kurdish Security Forces

Turkish air strikes targeting local armed groups in northern Iraq killed six members of Kurdish security forces in an apparent accident on Tuesday, a senior official said. 
"Six people were martyred, five from the peshmerga and the sixth from asayish," Lieutenant General Jabbar Yawar, secretary general of the peshmerga ministry in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish government, told AFP. 
"Nine others were also wounded by the air strike on the Sinjar mountain," he said, in reference to a northwestern region of Iraq which is the main hub of the Yazidi minority. 
The peshmerga are the Kurdish Regional Government's armed forces and the asayish its intelligence service. 
Yawar and other officials said the overnight strike apparently targeted a Yazidi militia allied with Turkey's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which Ankara, a key ally of the Iraqi Kurdish government, considers a terrorist organisation. 
The air strike was warried out at 2:25 am (2315 GMT), said Yawar, who added that forces from the Yazidi Protection Units (YBS) were present at the targeted positions. 
Zardasht Shingali, a spokesman for the YBS, said the strikes lasted three hours and hit five of his group's positions in the area. 
He told AFP that the targets included a radio station, a position in the strategic Shilo Valley west of the mountain and another in the town of Sinuni, which lies at the foot of the mountain's northern flank.

Source: NNA