MERGA, Iraq—Dozens of villages have been abandoned and hundreds of families displaced close to Iraq’s northern border with Turkey as a result of Turkish airstrikes targeting militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, better known as the PKK.
Of the 76 villages of the Barwari sub-district of Dohuk governorate, which lies along the Turkish border, between half and a third are empty, save for a few people occasionally returning to check on their property or work on their farms, according to Kurdish government officials.
On a recent trip into the mountains of northern Iraq, long a refuge for the PKK that has fought a three-decade war against Turkey for Kurdish rights, Associated Press reporters visited the village of Merga, only a few kilometers from the Turkish border.
The village, a small hamlet of perhaps a dozen houses surrounded by oak, apple and almond trees and set in a green valley among the snow-peaked mountains of the Zagros mountain range, had no inhabitants left except for four old men who said they came there only occasionally to look after their gardens.
“The aircraft keep coming here continuously. They bomb the mountain, they bomb the edge of the villages,” said Fawzi Ali, a local farmer, who had just driven up from Dohuk, where he had moved with his family last year, to check on his property. “People cannot live here.”
