Turkey’s foreign minister has invited the leader of Iraq’s semi-independent Kurdish region in a bid to patch up relations between the two.
Foreign Minister Hamlet Davutoğlu was quoted in Turkish media as saying he had invited Kurdish Prime Minister Massoud Barzani to visit Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“This hole started in 2007 when the Bush government decided to repair relations between the Kurds and the Turks and to encourage the Kurds to fight the PKK in northern Iraq and at the same time supplying intelligence to the Turks,” Hugh Pope, the Turkey and Cyprus Project Director with the International Crisis Group told The Media Line.
The PKK is an acronym for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has been fighting for a independent Kurdish state in eastern Turkey since 1984. An estimated 40,000 Turkish soldiers and civilians have been killed in the conflict. To date a truce signed in September 2009 has held.
As the Turkish army became ever more successful in its operations against the PKK, the group’s fighters began taking refuge in the mountainous regions along the border with Iraq. According to Turkey, this process led to the establishment of the semi-independent Kurdish region in northern Iraq following the American invasion in 2003.
The PKK then set up bases in northern Iraq to launch operations against the Turkish military, which in 2007 had amassed a force of more than 100,000 troops along the Iraqi border.
“The [new] relations have taken off as part of AKP activism in Iraq and the region,” Pope said, referring to Erdoğan’s ruling AK Party. “This is backed by solid economic investment, with Turkish hopes of Kurdish gas and oil from a united Iraq flowing through Turkey.”
Yusuf Kanli, former chief columnist of the Turkey Daily News, argued that it was a good move “being in contact with the leaders of a region where we have a very serious terrorism problem.”
“Dialogue is better than cross border tension,” Kanli told The Media Line. “Barzani has a very serious credibility problem in Turkey, in that he talks differently depending on where he is. His actions on the ground – that is what is important.”