The following article was originally published in Rudaw on December 21, 2016.
KOYA, Kurdistan Region—The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (PDK) will not respond to terrorist attacks with terrorism, said Khalid Azizi, the leader of the group at the burial ceremony of a number of his party members who were killed in a twin bomb attack on their headquarters Tuesday night.
Azizi whose party has accused Iran of staging the attack on his party headquarters and political bureau in the city of Koya said that they “will not respond to the enemy with terrorism,”
“The Islamic Republic of Iran wants to create an atmosphere of instability,” he told reporters at the burial ceremony. “Terrorism is sewn into Iran, but terrorism does not scare the PDK.”
Five of his fighters and a security guard were killed Tuesday night when a twin bomb attack targeted Azizi’s party office in Koya.
PDK better known locally as HDK is a splinter group of the PDKI led by Mustafa Hejri.
Azizi said that members of his party were marking the assassination day of their leader Abdulrahman Ghassemlou, killed in Vienna in 1989, “when Iran responded with an attack that killed five of us,”
Azizi called on all Kurdish parties to stay united and face changes sweeping across the Middle East together.
“The fighting of the Peshmerga against ISIS on the frontline and for our people’s right cause elsewhere, especially in eastern Kurdistan, will soon bear fruit,” he said.
Rudaw correspondent in Koya said that the security forces have launched an investigation into last night’s bombing and are looking into PDK surveillance cameras.
The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) that is in charge of Koya’s security condemned the attack and urged the PDK “to cooperate with the security forces in their investigations in order to find the truth and bring the culprits to justice.”
This article was originally published in Rudaw.
