Political and human rights violations of Turkey in Syria and Iraq

The Turkish military regularly targets Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) bases in Iraq. The Iraqi government has issued formal complaints against Turkish incursions into its sovereign territory.

Turkey continues to threaten assaults on other Kurdish-held areas inside Syria, including Manbij, and despite sharing a common enemy, many of Turkey’s air strikes have targeted Kurdish fighters rather than Islamic State militants.

Human Rights Watch had previously documented several Turkish Armed Forces aerial attacks that caused civilian casualties in their 2018 offensive on the Afrin district in Syria’s Aleppo governorate.

Human Rights Watch has also documented that Turkey-backed armed groups in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have seized, looted, and destroyed the property of Kurdish civilians in the Afrin district of northern Syria.