Two journalists killed in Iraq drone strike - officials

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq — A drone strike killed two women journalists in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region on Friday, officials said, blaming Turkey whose military operates against Kurdish fighters in the area.

The counter-terrorism service in regional capital Arbil said the dead were fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) but officials in the region's second city Sulaimaniyah said they were journalists,

An Iraqi security official told AFP on condition of anonymity that a "drone likely belonging to the Turkish army struck a vehicle carrying journalists" in Sayyid Sadik, east of Sulaimaniyah. 

When contacted by AFP, the defence ministry in Ankara said it was "not the Turkish army" that carried out the strike. 

The counter-terrorism service in Arbil reported a strike by "a Turkish army drone against a vehicle of fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Sayyid Sadik district". 

"A PKK official, his driver and a fighter were killed" in the bombing, it added. 

But the head of the Sulaimaniyah journalists' union, Karouan Anwar, told reporters that the two women killed were "known to work in the world of journalism and the media". 

The director of Kurdish media production house CHATR, Kamal Hama Ridha, said he employed the journalists, saying one was a resident of Sulaimaniyah province while the other was a Kurd from Turkey. 

The Kurdish region's deputy prime minister, Qubad Talabani, described the strike as an "unjustifiable crime" and a "flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty".

"The victims of the drone attack... were two journalists and not members of an armed force and did not represent a threat to the security and stability of any country or the region", he said.

The PKK, which has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, has rear-bases in the mountains of northern Iraq.

The Turkish army maintains a network of bases in the region to fight the Kurdish militant group, which is blacklisted as a "terrorist organisation" by the European Union and the United States. 

Following a visit to Baghdad by Turkish officials, the federal government declared the PKK a "banned organisation" in March. 

Earlier this month, Turkey agreed a military cooperation pact with Iraq that will see joint training and command centres to fight the Kurdish militants.