Turkiye intelligence agency kills PKK’s mastermind of 2021 forest fires

Turkiye’s National Intelligence Agency (MIT) has reportedly killed the mastermind behind the rampant forest fires of 2021, eliminating a key figure in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK) ‘environmental terrorism’.

According to the Turkish newspaper the Daily Sabah, MIT conducted an operation in northern Iraq this week, in which it managed to kill Ozgur Sores – the PKK’s Turkiye officer – along with a group of militants he was attempting to smuggle into Turkiye for a planned attack.

Sores reportedly first served the youth spokesperson for the PKK – designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkiye, the United States, and the European Union – in Istanbul between 2006 and 2008, before he moved to Iraq that latter year.

He was responsible for the transfer of weapons, ammunition, and bomb components to PKK members through Syria, as well as for the organisation of the group’s actions in cities and urban areas. Then, since 2019, Sores oversaw for the group’s activities in Turkiye itself, founding the Children of Fire movement which has allegedly been responsible for numerous forest fires and environmental sabotage incidents within the country.

Among those incidents were the widespread forest fires that spread throughout much of Turkiye in the summer of 2021, affecting large swathes of territory and destroying over 150,000 hectares of forest across areas such as Mugla, Mersin, and Hatay in the south-west, south, and south-east of the country. The fires also impacted much of Turkiye’s ecosystem and the industries built on it.

READ: Suspect paid to start forest fires in Turkey, media reports

According to the paper, which cited a report by the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA), the Children of Fire

movement directly received its orders and directives from the PKK, forming a major part of the group’s “environmental terrorism” strategy to expand its separatist activities against the Turkish state.

Sores was reportedly the key figure in that initiative, directly giving the orders to start and spread the forest fires across Turkiye as the head of PKK operations within the country. Following the fires, he is said to have crossed back into Iraq in 2022, passing through Gare in its northern region, and led the Children of Fire from there.

He had been plotting another attack to be set off in Turkiye, according to Turkish intelligence which had been following Sores in Iraq, and he had reportedly received the order from the PKK’s de-facto leader Murat Karayılan. With that goal, Sores was intending to cross into the country with fellow militants before MIT took them out.

The operation was part of the Turkish security services’ counterterrorism efforts and interventions in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, which have intensified in recent years. Most of the operations are conducted in the form of air or drone strikes, and usually target areas where PKK-affiliated militants and leading individuals are reportedly situated.

READ: Turkiye to continue military operations in Syria, Iraq – FM