PKK says arrested two Turkish intelligence officers in Iraq

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group says it has arrested two Turkish intelligence officials, who were planning to assassinate one of its prominent leaders in Iraq.

According to reports, Diyar Xerib, a leading member of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) - a PKK-affiliated transnational body - said on Monday that they had captured two Turkish nationals working for the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) last week, refraining from identifying them.

“Turkey should be glad we haven’t shown the people we captured in the media yet,” he told the Roj news channel. “We could just parade them to the press now and publish their names.”

The two MIT officers had reportedly been staying in the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraq’s semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan and had been planning to assassinate a senior PKK figure.

Ankara has not made any comments about the reported arrests.

The news comes following the expulsion of Behroz Galali, the Ankara representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a Sulaymaniyah-based Iraqi Kurdish party, from Turkey.

The PUK is seen as being somewhat closer to the PKK than Iraqi Kurdistan’s ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).

Xerib, however, wondered why PUK had been implicated.

He further said MIT operatives “wanted to turn Sulaymaniyah into a city of chaos and the center of terror attacks against PKK administrators.”

Speaking to a news conference upon his arrival in Iraqi Kurdistan on Thursday, Galali implied that the closure of the Ankara office of the PUK was linked to Turkey’s opposition to an upcoming referendum on independence of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.

Kurdistan is to hold the plebiscite on September 25.

The central government in Baghdad is opposed to the vote, while regional players like Iran and Turkey have also expressed concerns about the planned referendum, arguing it could create further instability in the region.

Turkey’s fierce opposition to the idea of an independent Kurdistan comes amid its large-scale military crackdown against suspected PKK militants at home and in northern Iraq.

The PKK has fought the Turkish government for more than three decades; an insurgency that Ankara says is mostly originated from mountainous regions in northern Iraq. Ankara views the PKK as a terrorist organization.

More than 15 million Kurds live in Turkey, most of them in areas bordering Iran, Iraq and Syria in the south.

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