Angry Iraq buries dead from shelling blamed on Turkey

• The coffins of the nine dead were flown on a military aircraft to Baghdad from Arbil.
• An honour guard bore the coffins at a ceremony witnessed by Iraqi PM Mustafa al-Kadhemi.
• The government has blamed neighbouring Turkey, which has denied any involvement.

An angry and bereaved Iraq buried nine tourists, including a newlywed, killed in an artillery bombardment of a Kurdish hill village on Thursday.

The government has blamed neighbouring Turkey, which has denied any involvement and has instead blamed outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party rebels (PKK).

Germany called for an urgent investigation.

The coffins of the nine dead, draped in Iraqi national flags and festooned with flowers, were flown on a military aircraft to Baghdad from Arbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region.

An honour guard bore the coffins at a ceremony witnessed by Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi on the tarmac of Baghdad’s airport, where his office said he met relatives of the victims who came to claim their loved ones’ bodies for burial.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein and Kurdish regional president Nechirvan Barzani had led the pallbearers carrying the smallest of the coffins, a child’s, onto the military plane in Arbil, an AFP correspondent reported.

Wednesday’s shelling in the Zakho district village of Parakh also wounded 23 people, the majority of them domestic tourists seeking respite from the heat of the plains in the mountains of the Kurdish north.

Among the dead was Abbas Alaa, 24, an engineer married for barely a week, said a friend who gave his name as Nour.

Alaa was on his honeymoon — his first-ever trip, Nour said — and his wife was wounded.

“We can’t believe it,” said Nour who waited with other friends at a modest Baghdad home for relatives to return with his corpse.

“This doesn’t happen in any other country, only Iraq,” Nour said.

The deaths prompted angry anti-Turkish demonstrations in cities across Iraq.

In Baghdad, dozens of demonstrators protested outside the Turkish visa office early Thursday, despite a heavy police presence.

Loudspeakers blared out patriotic songs as protesters chanted slogans demanding the expulsion of the Turkish ambassador, an AFP journalist reported.

Protesters brandished portraits of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan labelled “terrorist”. They trampled Turkish flags underfoot.

“We want to burn down the embassy. The ambassador must be expelled,” said demonstrator Ali Yassin, 53. “Our government is doing nothing.”

There were similar protests on Wednesday night in the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala and in the southern city of Nasiriyah.

Germany’s foreign ministry on Thursday said “the circumstances of the attack and those responsible” must be urgently investigated.

“The German government assigns great importance to respect for Iraq’s state sovereignty and international law,” it said.

In Tehran, the foreign ministry spokesman said “Iran considers the security of Iraq as its own security and will not hesitate to provide any assistance in this regard”.

In an unusually strong rebuke, Iraq’s prime Minister Kadhemi warned Turkey that Iraq reserves the “right to retaliate”.

Kadhemi called the artillery fire a “flagrant violation” of sovereignty — a line echoed by the Kurdistan administration.

Iraq said it was recalling its charge d’affaires from Ankara and demanded an official apology from Turkey along with “the withdrawal of its armed forces from all Iraqi territory”.

The Turkish foreign ministry denied responsibility for the bombardment, saying these “kinds of attacks” were committed by “terrorist organisations”.

On its Twitter account, the Turkish embassy offered its condolences to “our brother Iraqis killed by the PKK terrorist organisation”.

Ankara launched an offensive in northern Iraq in April dubbed “Operation Claw-Lock”, which it said targets fighters from the PKK.

The rebels have kept up a deadly insurgency for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkey since 1984.

Ankara’s Western allies also list the group as a “terrorist organisation”.

As part of its campaign against the insurgents, the Turkish army has maintained dozens of outposts across Iraq’s Kurdish north for the past 25 years. There have been isolated calls to have them removed.

Iraq and Turkey are trading partners, but Ankara’s repeated offensives against PKK rear bases in the north have been a source of friction in relations, particularly when civilians have been killed.

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