Lawyers Selma Benkhelifa, Joke Callewaert and Georges-Henri Beauthier issued a press statement after visiting Shengal and Maxmur. The lawyers went on a fact finding mission about the use of Turkish drones against civilians.

The statement said: “At the end of July 2022, Iraq filed a complaint with the United Nations about the death of 9 civilians killed by Turkish drones in Zakho, in Northern Iraq. These Turkish attacks on Iraqi territory are incessant and have caused dozens of civilian victims in the Kurdish region.

We went on a mission to listen to these victims or their families. Barely back, we learn with amazement that the refugee camp where we were received was the victim of a new drone attack, on 29 August.”

The statement continued: “First of all, we went to meet the Yazidi population, a religious minority persecuted and threatened with genocide by Daesh.

In the village of Khanesur in Shengal, near the Syrian border, we are immediately confronted with the reality of this permanent threat: a drone is flying overhead.

The inhabitants all express their terror in the face of these sky killers. Turkish drones fly over their village every day.

We meet the mother of a young student killed in a strike on the village hospital, where doctors were also killed. We also meet the mother of a Yazidi politician who was killed in a hit on his car. Then we saw a child seriously injured by a strike on the community center.”

The statement added: “For 275 years (1640 - 1915), Yazidis were massacred and subjected to attempted genocides in the Ottoman Empire. Daesh took over these massacres. We remember the young girls being kidnapped and sold. For the Yezidis, the Erdogan regime continues this genocidal policy. The people fought and repelled the Islamic State assassins. Today they face a new threat against which they feel helpless and defenseless.

Our visits to the families of the victims are heart breaking and leave us with more than a sense of outrage. Something has to be done.”

The lawyers continued: “We then leave for the refugee camp of Maxmur, further east, near the city of Mosul. Here, too, overflights by Turkish drones have been a daily occurrence for months.

We met the inhabitants of the camp. They explain to us that the camp was created in 1997 after the families were forced to leave their villages in Turkey, burned by the Turkish army. These villagers fled in 1994 and were pursued by the Turkish army in Iraq. Today, they have rebuilt their life and their home in Iraq, in the middle of a quasi-desert. They continue to be persecuted by Turkey.

Turkish drones target them on the grounds that they are PKK fighters. However, the victims are civilians, such as a 73-year-old woman whose daughter we met, three young women tending their cattle, a 16-year-old girl milking her sheep, etc.

The Maxmur camp is located 250 km from the Turkish border and cannot pose a threat to Turkey.”

The lawyers ended their statement with the following remarks: “We returned shocked and outraged by these illegal, illegitimate and unpunished murders. Legal action under international law must be taken, as well as initiatives to ban the use of drones as weapons of war in violation of international law.”