On April 18, 2022 Turkey launched a new ground and air offensive against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq. Supported by helicopters and drones, Turkish jets and artillery struck suspected targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and then commando troops crossed into the region by land or were airlifted by helicopters. In short, in a move disturbingly akin to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s in Ukraine, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invaded the territory of a sovereign nation – Iraq – in pursuit of a political purpose of his own.
Once upon a time the
Kurds were a proud and independent nation thriving in their own land. Subject to many foreign invasions, they
refused to be integrated with their various conquerors and retained their
distinctive culture. At the start of the
First World War, their country, Kurdistan, was a small part of the Ottoman
empire. Afterwards, in shaping the
future Middle East the Western powers, in particular the UK, promised to act as
guarantors of their freedom. It was a
promise subsequently broken. Denied
independence in their own homeland, the Kurdish people were split largely between
four states newly endorsed by the League of Nations. They became minorities in the mountains and
valleys of southeastern Turkey, northwestern
Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria.
The PKK, founded in
1978, was and is an armed political group.
Claiming to represent all people in historically Kurdish regions, it has
affiliated itself with other political and social groups including leading
political parties in Turkey and Syria. The PKK is also present in Iran, where
members fought against the Iranian regime for several years before agreeing to
stop military hostilities in 2011.
The PKK’s original
objective was to establish a socialist Greater Kurdistan uniting the Kurdish regions
of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Since the mid-2000s, however, there has been
a new goal, master-minded by Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader imprisoned by
Turkey since February 1999 on İmralı island in
the Sea of Marmara, where he is serving a life
sentence.. Setting to one side the political aim of uniting the Kurdish people
in their own homeland, the new objective, dubbed “democratic confederalism”,
seeks to establish autonomous Kurdish areas in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and
Iraq. Something of the sort now exists
in both Syria and Iraq.
Erdogan is
unconvinced. He is aware that the idea
of an amalgamated Kurdish state, involving a change of national borders,
remains a dream among Kurdish extremists, and that conflict within Turkey remains
a possibility. The attack on April 18,
named Operation Claw Lock, struck shelters, bunkers, caves, tunnels, ammunition
depots and headquarters belonging to the PKK, which maintains bases in northern
Iraq from where it has attacked Turkey in the past. Turkey’s Defense Ministry said the new
offensive was launched after it was determined that the militants were
regrouping and preparing for a “large-scale attack.”
Erdogan is also keen to
stamp on the idea that disparate Kurdish communities might amalgamate or
integrate. This came to the fore during the conflict in Syria against Islamic
State. For example, in 2014 Kurdish volunteers from across the Middle East
mobilized behind Syrian Kurdish fighters in the battle for the northern Syrian
town of Kobane. Syrian Kurds benefited
from the fighting experience of the Kurdish commanders who had fought with the
PKK in its longstanding conflict against the Turkish state.
Guney Yildiz, a
researcher and journalist based in London, focuses on Turkey, the Kurds
and Syria. He has advised the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select
Committee on Turkey, worked for BBC News and also the Middle East Institute
based in Washington D.C. Yildiz
maintains that Kurds across all four nations – Turkey, Iran. Iraq and Syria –
are today receiving public and moral support from each other and from the
Kurdish diaspora abroad. He believes it is relevant to ask whether Kurds will
be content to continue as confederated autonomous areas within nation states,
or whether they will seek political independence.
The answer, he believes, lies in how cross-pollination, political recognition, and geography will connect Kurds in Turkey (known to political Kurds as “Northern Kurdistan”), with Kurds in Iraq (known as “Southern Kurdistan”), with Kurds in Iran (“Eastern Kurdistan”), to Kurds in Syria (“Western Kurdistan”).
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This is Erdogan’s
nightmare scenario. The PKK has been an
armed group within Turkey’s body politic for decades, seeking Kurdish
independence through acts of terror. As
such it was viewed by the Turkish establishment as an existential threat to the
state. In 2016 Joe Biden, then US Vice
President, confirmed that Washington regarded the PKK as a danger to Turkey’s
integrity and, comparing it to Islamic State, said it was "a terror group
plain and simple".
Nothing like unity of
policy or purpose reigns within the Kurdish camp as a whole. The Kurdistan
Regional Government in Iraq has an uneasy relationship with the PKK group,
whose presence complicates the region’s lucrative trade ties with Turkey. Erdogan’s Operation Claw Lock was launched
two days after a rare visit to Turkey by the prime minister of Iraq’s
autonomous Kurdish region, Masrour Barzani, suggesting that he went to be briefed
on Ankara’s plans. Barzani said after his talks with the Turkish president that
he welcomed “expanding cooperation to promote security and stability” in
northern Iraq.
Turkey routinely carries
out attacks in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where the PKK has bases and
training camps in Sinjar and on the mountainous border with Turkey. But the
offensives have strained Turkey’s ties with Iraq’s central government in
Baghdad.
. Iraq’s President
Barham Salih termed the latest incursion “unacceptable”, describing it as a
threat to the country's national security and a violation of its sovereignty. He is certainly not wrong about that.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-705807
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