Turkey and Iraq

Turkey is very upset about Iraqi Kurdish officials allowing the secular PKK guerrilla group to have a safe haven in Iraq: Turkey warns of plans to invade northern Iraq by Michael Howard Guardian 06/30/07:

Turkey has prepared a blueprint for the invasion of northern Iraq and will take action if US or Iraqi forces fail to dislodge the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) from their mountain strongholds across the border, Turkey's foreign minister Abdullah Gul has warned.

"The military plans have been worked out in the finest detail. The government knows these plans and agrees with them," Mr Gul told Turkey's Radikal newspaper. "If neither the Iraqi government nor the US occupying forces can do this [crush the PKK], we will take our own decision and implement it," Mr Gul said. The foreign minister's uncharacteristically hawkish remarks were seen as a response to pressure from Turkey's generals, who have deployed some 20,000-30,000 troops along the borders with Iraq, and who are itching to move against the rebels they say are slipping across the border to stage attacks inside Turkey.

Juan Cole at his Informed Comment blog 07/01/07 reads this as:

Turkey is giving the US military in Iraq an ultimatum: clean out the 5,000 PKK guerrillas holing up in Iraqi Kurdistan or Turkey will invade and take care of the problem itself.

Howard's article also raises this additional complication:

In a fresh bout of sabre-rattling on Wednesday, the chief of staff, General Yasar Buyukanit, asked the government in Ankara to set the parameters for an incursion across the border. "Will we go to northern Iraq just to fight PKK rebels, or, for example, what will we do if we come under attack from local Iraqi Kurdish groups?" Gen Buyukanit said.

The general's remarks rang alarm bells both in Arbil - the Iraqi Kurdish regional capital - and Baghdad, where they were interpreted as a request to also go after Iraq's Kurdish authorities, whom Turkey accuses of aiding the PKK fighters.

One of the risks of the Iraq War has always been that it could turn into a full-scale regional war, with direct interventions by Turkey, Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia (although Saudi Arabia has more limited military means). There are Kurdish areas in Iran, Syria, and especially Turkey and Iraq. Turkey has an obvious interest in seeing any Kurdish independence movement contained to something like the current Kurdish levels of autonomy in Iraq. Turkey has also viewed the Turkmen ethnic group concentrated in the oil-rich area of Kirkūk as a group that deserves Turkish protection.

If Turkey limits itself to a military incursion that's focused specifically on known concentrations of PKK troops, then such a military invasion could make sense from their viewpoint and it could be reasonably limited. A settlement that involved an enforced buffer zone could probably satisfy Turkish concerns in the short run.

But, as the United States and Britain have found out, a longer-term intervention into Iraq with the goal of forcing political settlements on unwilling Iraqis through bombs, bullets and (in the American case, sadly) torture, can be a very messy undertaking.

Such risks would be inherent in a Turkish attempt to suppress the internal Iraqi Kurdish militias, which would likely be seen by the Iraqi Shi'a government as strenthening the Sunnis. Not that the Iraqi Sunnis would necessarily be happy to have the Turkish army in Iraq, either.

Kirkūk

And if the Turks were to try to seize Kirkūk or to impose some kind of protectorate for the Turkmen there, they would be putting themselves in the middle of one of the potentially worst flashpoints in Iraq, where Kurds, Sunni, Shi'a and Turkmen are competing over the control of oil in that region. If the Sunnis don't wind up with a major share of Kirkūk's oil resources, the Sunni areas will be left with no major known oil reserves.

Putting themselves in the middle of that could make Iraq the kind of quagmire for Turkey that it is for the United States.

How Turkey eventually accomodates the issues of its own Kurdish population is another story. But the more immediate issues surrounding a major Turkish military incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan don't seem to be intractable ones, if all parties are sensible enough to limit their short-run objectives accordingly.

Tags: iraq war, turkey