The Maxmur refugee camp in southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq) has been attacked again by a Turkish drone. At around 10 a.m. local time today, a bomb went off in the garden of a house, causing property damage, the camp administration announced on Monday. Miraculously, no people were injured.
What makes the incident even more shocking is that Iraqi central government officials and a United Nations (UN) delegation were present in the camp at the time of the attack. The background to this is a census that is taking place in Iraq. Security staff from the Baghdad delegation examined the impact site and confirmed that the missile had been fired from a Turkish drone.
The Maxmur Refugee Camp, located southwest of Hewlêr (Erbil) in a disputed area between the government of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (KRI) and the Iraqi central government, is home to around twelve thousand people. A large part of the population was expelled by the Turkish state in the 1990s as part of the anti-Kurdish ‘counterinsurgency’ and a scorched earth policy. Under the pretext of fighting the PKK, around 3,000 Kurdish villages were depopulated or burned down at the time. After an odyssey of several years and stays in various camps, the people founded the Maxmur camp on the edge of the desert in 1998. They thus form the largest Kurdish refugee community in the world.
The camp, which is organised and run by the refugees themselves in a grassroots democratic way, is a thorn in the side of Turkey. Ankara criminalises the camp as a ‘hotbed’ of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) that needs to be “cleansed”, and repeatedly attacks it from the air. The camp was last attacked by a Turkish drone last Tuesday. It targeted a house, injuring three women, one of them seriously.
