Kurdish militants reportedly shoot down Turkish security forces helicopter
Source: Washington Post
On Saturday, media affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a leftist militant group battling the Turkish state, posted a video purporting to show a fighter downing a Cobra attack helicopter with a man-portable air-defense system — or MANPADS — in the mountains of southeastern Turkey on Friday morning. Arms observers said this is the first time they have seen PKK fighters successfully using MANPADS in their four-decade fight against the Turks.
But the use of a surface-to-air missile — which arms experts said is likely a Russian-made 9K38 Igla — is a new and troubling development. It's unclear where the militants, who maintain bases in both Turkey and Iraq, would have obtained the weapon system. But former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was known to have acquired the same Russian-made system in the 1980s, as did Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/14/kurdish-militants-just-challenged-turkish-air-power-in-a-major-way/
Putin is stirring the pot.
= new reply since forum marked as read
. . . is something we all want to get right behind. 
U.N. slams Turkey for ‘alarming’ reports of human rights abuses
The United Nations and Human Rights Watch accused Turkish security forces Tuesday of committing serious human rights violations against Turkish civilians and Syrian refugees in recent months.
The allegations come as Europe has pushed Turkey to help stem the flow of migrants to Europe while also calling on Turkish authorities to soften anti-terrorism laws to limit rights abuses.
Turkish security forces may have deliberately shot civilians, destroyed infrastructure, carried out arbitrary arrests and triggered a wave of displacement in an ongoing military campaign against ethnic Kurdish separatists in the country’s southeast, U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said Tuesday. He urged Turkish authorities to allow independent investigators to probe the alleged attacks, which he called “extremely alarming.”
A separate report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Turkish border guards of shooting at and beating Syrian asylum seekers along Turkey’s frontier with the war-ravaged nation. At least five people have been killed in the past two months, the rights group said. Turkish officials have previously denied reports that border guards have fired at refugees or forced them back into Syria.
UN deplores Turkish military abuses in Kurdish areas
A top UN official has voiced alarm about violence against civilians by Turkish government forces in Kurdish-majority south-eastern Turkey.
The UN says it has reports that more than 100 people were burned to death while sheltering in basements in Cizre.
UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Raad al-Hussein urged Turkey to grant the UN unimpeded access to the affected areas.
'Mass killings' of Kurds in Cizre reported to UN
Turkey’s Human Rights Association says it has submitted a report to the United Nations detailing the mass killing of Kurds in the city of Cizre. The documents were sent to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate.
...
It was Russian journalists who reported mass killings and leveling of city blocks in Kurish areas. Maybe that's why some people are blaming Putin.
Still these are facts.
