Baghdad remains silent as Turkey continues fight against PKK militants in northern Iraq

A Turkish drone struck a vehicle belonging to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the village of Tel Qasab in Iraq’s Sinjar district on Monday, killing many, a federal police source was quoted as saying by Iraqi media. PKK-linked media reported that two journalists and their driver, as well as a passerby, were injured in the attack.

Turkey has repeatedly targeted suspected PKK members in Sinjar in recent years, seeking to end the group’s grip on the region, which is home to Iraq’s Yazidis and serves as a strategic land bridge for PKK militants moving between Iraq and Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. The PKK established a base in Sinjar in 2014, when the Islamic State began its genocidal campaign against the Yazidis, shepherding thousands to safety through a corridor into Syria and then back to Mount Sinjar.

The region is currently dominated by a patchwork of forces, including Iranian-backed Shiite militias and Yazidi armed groups loyal to the PKK that cooperate tactically; others are more independent. In April, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said that Sinjar must be rid of the PKK. “Sinjar is right next to the Syrian border, and as long as the PKK dominates in Sinjar, its interactions with (PKK-linked groups) across the border will continue. This must be stopped,” Fidan said in a televised interview.

Monday’s attack comes as part of Turkey’s expanded operations against PKK targets inside Iraqi Kurdistan, with ground troops being moved from Cukurca in Turkey’s Hakkari province to reinforce and expand Turkish bases and outposts near Zap, Metina and Gare, a mountain range immediately south of the Turkish border in Dahuk province, a local PKK commander told Al-Monitor.

“Turkey has been trying to drive us out of this territory for three years, but since April, the Turkish army has been using paved roads to advance its troops, and launched a new offensive on July 3 to cut Gare Mountain off from our other forces,” the commander said. “They are using warplanes, drones and helicopters; they are using all the weapons at their disposal.” Two battalions are leading the ground operations, the PKK commander said.

Murat Karayilan, the veteran PKK commander in charge of the group’s armed wing, the People’s Defense Forces (HPG), is known to be headquartered deep in Gare.

The local commander said Turkey had made progress, seizing several strategic peaks, but that “our forces were fighting back valiantly from our resistance tunnels and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy.” The commander was referring to the network of tunnels the PKK has built since Turkey began deploying its world-renowned killer drones against them, making it harder for the group to maintain an above-ground presence as it has for decades.

Last Thursday, a senior Turkish Defense Ministry official told reporters at a briefing in Ankara that Turkey had “neutralized 57 terrorists” in northern Iraq and Syria, without specifying how many of them had been killed in northern Iraq.

The Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a US-based war monitoring organisation, said the Turkish operation had caused the exodus of 602 villages across Dahuk, and that 20,000 dunams of farmland had been burned in some 238 Turkish bombardments, mainly in the same province.

In recent months, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch a major offensive that would permanently rid Iraqi Kurdistan of rebels, raising the specter of an offensive by several thousand Turkish troops across the border. But that has not happened. “The Turkish military knows that it cannot completely eliminate the PKK, which it has tried many times in the past and failed many times,” a senior Iraqi official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Al-Monitor. Instead, he said, Turkey is seeking to isolate and corral the militants in their strategic strongholds of Sinjar and Gare and further east in Kirkuk and Qandil on the Iranian border, before what he called “surgical operations.” The official did not elaborate.

Contain, not collapse

Ultimately, Turkey wants to establish full control over its border with Iraq, just as it does with Syria, where it is conducting parallel operations, but largely from the air and on a more limited scale.

The official dismissed speculation that Turkey was seeking to eliminate Karayilan, noting that even if it did, he is buried so deep that he would be extremely difficult to find.

The official also dismissed reports that Turkey’s offensive is aimed at building the kind of public trust that would allow the government to resume peace talks with the PKK, which were suspended in 2015 amid mutual recriminations.

The speculation stems from Erdogan’s plan to revise the constitution to circumvent rules that prevent him from running for a third term when his current one expires in 2028. He could seek support from the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), a pro-Kurdish party that the government says is inspired by the PKK, a claim that has been used to imprison thousands of its members, including elected officials. DEM supporters have been influencing elections since 2015 in favor of the opposition.

However, “Turkey does not think it needs to talk with the PKK and it is rather the opposite,” the official argued.

Turkey’s recent renewed assertiveness coincides with Erdogan’s visit to Iraq in April, his first since 2011, for official talks with Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. The trip was rich in results, including promises of cooperation against the PKK. It follows Baghdad’s decision during Fidan’s official visit to the country in March to “ban” the militants, but not label them “terrorists,” in line with Turkey’s demands.

Risky road

The visit also saw the signing of a four-party memorandum of understanding between Turkey, Iraq, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for joint cooperation on the $17 billion Iraq Development Road project. Launched last year, the 1,200-kilometer (745-mile) road and rail project is expected to make Iraq a key transit hub, connecting Asia and Europe with a link between Turkey and Iraq’s energy-rich Faw port in Basra.

Sudani, who is keen to seek re-election to a second term when his current term expires next year, is in desperate need of a high-profile project to boost his image. “So far, he has done renovation work, such as repairing roads and bridges to improve their efficiency. But the flagship project he wants to sell is the Development Road,” said an Iraqi source familiar with Sudani’s thinking.

Turkey’s cooperation on the development road project is therefore essential, even if it will likely face opposition from Iran, which disapproves of any project that would reduce its influence over Iraq.

Iraqi Kurds, for their part, fear that the road will bypass their region, making Ibrahim Khalil’s passage with Turkey, the only official land link between the two sides, less important.

“Since this route is designed to bypass (the Kurdistan Region of Iraq) and cut off land connections to PKK-affiliated forces that control the Iraqi-Syrian border, it carries significant security implications for Turkey itself, as well as potential risks for the (Kurdistan Regional Government),” the Washington Institute for Near East Policy observed in a recent report.

Despite potential difficulties, including the issue of funding, Ankara is using the project to secure Baghdad’s support for its anti-PKK operations. This could explain Iraq’s official silence in the face of Turkey’s continued violations on its territory.

Turkey’s overture to Baghdad is part of its broader strategy to secure cooperation from its neighbors against the PKK, in a repeat of the “hot pursuit” agreements signed with Iraq in the 1980s and with Syria in 1998. It largely explains Erdogan’s dramatic about-face toward his longtime foe, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom he now says he wants to welcome to Turkey along with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Iran’s new President Massoud Pezeshkian on Friday to congratulate him on his victory in Friday’s runoff presidential election, where he beat conservative rival Saeed Jalili with 54 percent of the vote. Erdogan said he hoped that bilateral relations between the two countries, “based on deep-rooted historical ties, will further develop in the new era,” according to the Turkish presidency’s transcript of the call.

“Masoud Pezeshkian is actually a Turk of Azerbaijani origin; for example, he speaks Tabriz Turkish. But when he goes to the Kurdish regions, he can also speak Kurdish there,” Erdogan told reporters upon his return from Germany, where he watched Turkey’s Euro 2024 football quarter-final against the Netherlands.

Pezeshkian’s father is of Azerbaijani origin and his mother is Kurdish. His ethnicity is highly unlikely to have any bearing on security policy, which will most likely see Tehran continue to collaborate with Turkey against the PKK when it feels it is in its interests and work with militants in places like Sinjar, where the PKK and Iranian agendas sometimes coincide. Tellingly, Iran’s state-run Press TV aired CPT’s reporting on the harm inflicted by Turkish operations on Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq.