Iraqi police announced today that they have arrested three people believed to be members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on charges of arson. Two of those arrested work for the security forces of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan and all of them are accused of setting fires in three cities.

In a statement, the PKK’s political arm “rejects the baseless allegations” and calls on “the Iraqi state and the Ministry of Interior to act responsibly towards the directives coming from the Turkish intelligence services” and “to identify the real perpetrators”.

The announcement by Iraqi police comes at a time of heightened tension in the autonomous Kurdistan, where the Turkish army continues its operations against the PKK.

The fires for which the three men are accused took place in 2023 and 2024 at shopping malls or markets in the cities of Kirkuk, Arbil and Dohuk, Iraq’s interior ministry spokesman said earlier, claiming that those arrested had confessed. The first was arrested in late May and “chemical substances” used to start the fires were found in his vehicle, according to that spokesman, General Moqdad Miri. “The PKK organization, a banned organization,” caused these fires, he added.

At the same press conference, an official of the Kurdistan Interior Ministry, Hemin Mirani, announced the identity of the two suspects and said that one was a member of the Peshmerga, the autonomous region’s armed forces, while the other was “an officer in Sulaymaniyah’s anti-terrorist service ». The two men were “recruited” by the PKK and “trained by fighters who came from Turkey and Syria.”

The three suspects appeared in the interview, dressed in the yellow uniform of prisoners, kneeling, blindfolded and with their hands cuffed behind their backs.

Both Turkey and officials in Erbil, Kurdistan’s capital, accuse the PKK of benefiting from support from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (UPK), the historic ruling party that controls the security services in Sulaymaniyah. In March, after the visit of high-ranking Turkish officials to Iraq, Baghdad labeled the PKK a “prohibited organization”, although Ankara is asking the Iraqi government to take a more active role in the fight against it.

The UPK parliamentary group recently condemned “the resumption of Turkish army operations” in autonomous Kurdistan, citing “damage” to agricultural land and property and deploring the “silence” of Baghdad and Arbil in the face of foreign presence soldiers in the country.