Iraqi police arrest 3 militants for arson in Kurdistan

Iraqi police announced on Monday the arrest of three suspected members of a militant group accused of arson attacks in the country's north.

The announcement comes at a time of heightened tension in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, where the Turkish army is conducting operations against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is listed as a "terrorist" group by Ankara and several Western allies.

The fires in 2023 and 2024 struck markets and shopping centres in the cities of Kirkuk, Arbil and Dohuk, Iraqi ministry of interior spokesman Moqdad Miri said during a press conference on Monday, saying that the suspects made "confessions".

One suspect was arrested at the end of May and "chemical products" used to start fires were found in his vehicle, Miri said.

"The entity responsible for execution... is the PKK organisation, a banned organisation," he added.

The objective was to "harm the commercial interests of a country with which they are in direct opposition," as well as "to impact the security and economic situation" of the autonomous region, he added.

The PKK, which has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, has a presence in northern Iraq, as does Turkey, which has operated from several dozen military bases there against the PKK.

Turkey's military operations, which sometimes take place deep inside Iraqi territory, have frequently strained bilateral ties.

During the joint conference, a senior official from Kurdistan's interior ministry, Hemin Mirany, revealed the identity of two of the suspects, saying that one belonged to the local Peshmerga armed forces.

The other suspect was an "officer in the anti-terrorist services of Sulaimaniyah", Kurdistan's second city, Mirany said.

The Kurdish official said the two men were "recruited" by the PKK and were "trained by fighters coming from Turkey and Syria in particular".

The three suspects were presented at the conference wearing yellow prison outfits, kneeling, blindfolded and handcuffed with their hands behind their backs.

Officials in both Turkey and Arbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, have accused the PKK of benefitting from support within the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a major political party which holds power and controls the security services in Sulaimaniyah.

In March, following a visit by senior Turkish officials to Iraq, Baghdad quietly listed the PKK as a "banned organisation" -- though Ankara demands that the Iraqi government do more in the fight against the militant group.

The PUK parliamentary bloc recently condemned "a resumption of Turkish army operations" in the Kurdistan region, noting "damages" inflicted on agricultural land and property, and criticising Baghdad and Arbil's "silence" around Turkey's military presence in the country.