Local authorities and news outlets in northern Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region have said that several people were killed in a Turkish drone strike on Friday, including two journalists. In an initial statement on Friday, the regional authorities said that a car belonging to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was struck near the city of Sulaymaniyah, killing a senior PKK official, his guard and his driver. However, a later statement by the Kurdistan regional government's Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani said that the attack targeted a group of journalists, two of whom were killed. "They were two women journalists, not members of an armed force to be a threat to the security and stability of any country or region," Talabani said in a statement. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a press advocacy organisation, also released a statement denouncing the deaths of the two journalists, identified as 27-year-old Hero Baha'uddin and 40-year-old Golestan Tara from Sterk TV.

The elite forces were focused primarily on Islamic State fighters in recent years, but other Islamic militant groups now also move through Iraq's porous borders with Iran and Turkey. The Iraqi government announced early on Tuesday that the drone was launched by Turkey and called on Ankara to halt such attacks. "This aggression constitutes a violation of Iraq's sovereignty, security and territorial integrity," said Maj. Gen. Yahya Rasoul Abdullah, military spokesman for the prime minister, "These repeated attacks are not consistent with the principle of good neighborly relations between countries, and threaten to undermine Iraq's efforts to build good and balanced political, economic, and security relations with its neighbors." Kurdish leaders, whose territory is routinely targeted by Turkey, used angrier rhetoric. "This criminal act is an open trespassing of the border of the Kurdistan Region and of Iraq, and it is part of the conspiracy aimed at disturbing the peace and stability of the Kurdistan Region," said Bafel Talabani, president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main political parties in Kurdistan and the dominant one in Sulaymaniyah.

Iran launched cross-border missile and drone strikes that killed nine people in Iraq's Kurdistan region Wednesday after accusing Kurdish armed groups based there of stoking a wave of unrest that has rocked the Islamic republic. The September 16 death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, 22, while in the custody of Iran's morality police has sparked a major wave of protests and a crackdown that has left scores of demonstrators dead over the past 12 nights. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has in recent days accused the Iraq-based Kurdish groups of "attacking and infiltrating Iran from the northwest of the country to sow insecurity and riots and spread unrest". After several earlier Iranian cross-border attacks that caused no casualties, a barrage of missiles and drones on Wednesday claimed nine lives and wounded 32, said the regional health minister in Arbil, Saman al-Barazanji, while visiting some off the wounded in a hospital in the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region. "There are civilians among the victims", including one of those killed, a senior official of the Kurdistan region earlier told AFP.