It took 10 days to find Muhsin Speri’s body. The 64-year-old had left his town in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan along with friends Hassan Sadiq and Safar Sini on a dry, windy day in December last year to fish and forage for wild honey and mushroom, in Lige the Amedi region of the Zagros mountains is hard and physical, but the area has been home to Kurdish and Assyrian communities in sync with the rhythms of the mountains for thousands of years. Many locals like to roam and camp for several days at a time, but after Speri’s family failed to reach him by phone for more than a week, a search party was launched.
The bodies of the three former peshmerga soldiers were found in the Zeri valley, torn to pieces by what is believed to have been a Turkish drone strike. Sadiq and Sini appeared to have been killed instantly, but Speri was found nearly 100 metres away, a trail of blood in his wake.“He tried to move to get help, to get a phone signal or fire his gun, to alert someone,” said his son, Baxtiyar, 35, at home in the town of Deraluk. “That’s how he died. Suffering for maybe two or three days.”
According to the Turkish defence ministry, five Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) combatants were “neutralised” in iraq the same week as the three childhood friends died. Requests for more information about the strike that killed the civilians went unanswered. A defence ministry source said operations only targeted terrorist elements and that all necessary measures are taken to prevent civilians from being harmed.
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