Senior Turkish Official Indicates Possible Joint Military Center With Iraqi Gov’t To Counter Kurdish Insurgency
A Turkish defense official revealed on Thursday that during bilateral talks held last week, the Iraqi government expressed interest in participating in a “joint operations center” to combat the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Baghdad’s full commitment to a shared campaign against the PKK would be a major political victory for Ankara, which, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has made pacifying the Kurdish faction a core military goal.
“Iraq also views the PKK as a threat to itself. They approached our offer to set up a joint operation center and to cooperate in the fight against terrorism positively,” the defense official explained.
Over the last several months, Turkey has unleashed dozens of airstrikes and small-scale ground assaults on PKK forces in Iraq and Syria, and Erdoğan allegedly hopes to incorporate the plan into a greater strategic document that he will sign next month.
Operating largely within the largely mountainous border region connecting the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region, northeastern Syria, and southern Turkey, the PKK has waged a 40-year insurgency in the name of creating an independent Kurdish state through armed resistance.
Fighting between the PKK and the Turkish state once largely took place within Turkey proper but has shifted southward in recent years. In the chaos of the Syrian Civil War, Turkey began significant cross-border counterinsurgency operations against existing PKK remnants in Syria and still controls territory along the two countries’ shared border.
The PKK is recognized as a terrorist organization by both the United States and the European Union, although both maintain strong ties to other Kurdish groups, a fact that sometimes strains their respective relationships with Ankara.
The US works closely with the Kurdish government’s standing military, the Peshmerga, and the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces on anti-terrorism operations against the Islamic State.
