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"Our duty is to protect the Kurds if we are able," he said.īut the long-time Kurdish leader made a distinction between that and being drawn into Syria's bloody civil war, which he said the Kurds must try to avoid. "We will not hesitate in directing strikes (against) the terrorist criminals in any place," Barzani said in an exclusive interview with AFP, when asked about the possibility of Kurdish action against militants in Iraq or Syria. Iraqi Kurdistan is prepared to strike militants anywhere, including neighbouring Syria, but the Kurds must avoid being drawn into its civil war, the autonomous region's president Massud Barzani told AFP.īarzani's remarks came after militants carried out a late-September attack on a security service headquarters in the Kurdish region's capital Arbil, killing seven people - a rare occurrence in an area usually spared the violence plaguing other parts of Iraq. The latest unrest takes the number of people killed so far this month to more than 270, and to over 4,950 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources. This year's spike in violence, which has included a number of sectarian attacks, has raised fears of a relapse into the kind of intense Sunni-Shiite bloodshed that peaked in 2006-2007 and killed tens of thousands of people. Violence in the country has reached a level not seen since 2008, when Iraq was just emerging from a brutal sectarian conflict.ĭiplomats and analysts say the Shiite-led government's failure to address the grievances of the Sunni Arab minority - which complains of political exclusion and abuses by security forces - has driven the rise in unrest. Militants seeking to cause maximum casualties frequently bomb places in Iraq where crowds of people gather, including shopping districts, markets, cafes and mosques. It is the biggest Muslim holiday of the year. The blast in Samarra came as people shopped ahead of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, which begins on Tuesday. The dead included seven women and a six-year-old child, the doctor said. A car bomb exploded in a crowded street in a city north of the Iraqi capital on Saturday, killing 13 people and wounding 32, police and a doctor said.