Sulaimaniya, July 20 (AKnews) - A delegation from the parliaments of the Kurdistan Region and Baghdad will visit on Thursday the bordering territories that have been subjected to five consecutive days of Iranian shelling.
The delegation which includes senior officials from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior,the Defense ministry, the Peshmarga (Kurdish security forces), Kurdistan's parliamentary Human Rights Committee and MPs from Baghdad and Erbil, will look into the displacement of villagers and nomads in the area and see first-hand the continuing military offensives.
"After we visit the area, we will issue a multi-lateral report to the relevant authorities in Iraq to find diplomatic and political solutions to the situation," Kurdistan's Human Rights Committee chief, Salar Mahmoud, told AKnews.
Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard have been engaged in a bloody battle with Kurdish separatist guerillas - the PJAK - since the latter took up arms in Kurdistan's Choman district near the Haji Omaran border last Saturday.
There have been conflicting reports from both sides concerning the number of casualties.
Earlier today, Hasan Abdullah, the mayor of Qaladze, a border town 125 km northeast of Sulaimaniya, told AKnews that the Iranian shelling is disrupting the lives of villagers in the area.
"Iranian artillery have continued to bombard the mountainous areas today... so far displacing 180 families from their homes," he said.
Iran has been sporadically shelling its border territories with Iraqi-Kurdistan for years, ostensibly to dislodge PJAK fighters believed to be based in the mountainous region.
The bombardments have left scores injured and dozens of homes evacuated to date. Last year a teenage girl was killed when an Iranian mortar hit a civilian house in the area.
© AK News 2011
