Yazidi, PKK elements in talks to join Iraqi army
The PKK fighters. File photo.
Sinjar (IraqiNews.com) Yazidi fighters who fought the Islamic State alongside the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in northern Iraq are in talks with the Iraqi army to join it.
Saad Hamu, a Yazidi journalist, told Sputnik News on Thursday that nearly 1000 Yazidi fighters, including 300 femals, who remained in Sinjar, west of Nineveh’s Mosul, after PKK’s recent pullout, are in negotiations with the Iraqi government to enlist them in the Iraqi army.
Earlier this week, Sinjar’s mayor, Mahma Khalil, reported the PKK’s pullout from Sinjar and the arrival of Iraqi army vanguards to the region.
PKK said in an earlier statement it was withdrawing from the mainly-Yazidi region as it managed to protect the locals from Islamic State militants whose defeat the Iraqi government declared last December.
IS militants had massacred thousands of Yazidis and held others hostage after they overran a third of Iraqi territories in 2014.
Turkey declared recently it was eyeing an offensive in Sinjar against the PKK, whom Ankara brands as terrorists, but Iraq officially rejected the announcement, assuring it would not allow the use of its territories for military action against any neighboring country.
Turkish warplanes has regularly pounded PKK locations in northern Iraq.