KurdistanObserver.com
Kurds Train for
Battle With Invading Kurdistan
June 5, 2007
The Financial Times
More than
four years after the fall of Baghdad, it beggars belief that anyone still has to
be persuaded that invading Iraq is a bad idea. Yet Turkey's army is now massed
on its south-eastern border, poised to deal what it presumably supposes would be
a killer blow to guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) based in Iraqi
Kurdistan.
Robert
Gates, US defence secretary, on Sunday warned Ankara against invading. But
Turkey's chief of staff formally sought his government's permission to launch a
cross-border offensive last week. There are reasons to believe he will get it -
none of them convincing.
Turkey is
aggrieved that units of the PKK, all but defeated after the vicious 1984-99
insurgency, have regrouped inside the self-governing Kurdish region of northern
Iraq, from where, Ankara says, they are carrying out cross-border raids and bomb
attacks.
The extent
of this activity is disputed. But the Kurdish regional government, America's
closest ally in Iraq, does appear to welcome the violent and cultish PKK as a
secular foil to the growth of radical Islamism in its territory. This has
further soured relations between Ankara and Washington, damaged when Turkey
denied the US the use ofits territory to open a northern front in 2003.
But more
than this lies behind Turkey's bellicosity. The Turkish establishment,
especially its influential military, has always resented European Union pressure
to grant minority rights to Turkey's Kurds - a condition of accession
negotiations - and US sponsorship of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq. It is also livid
at the looming referendum on incorporating the ethnically mixed area of Kirkuk
into Kurdistan, fearing its oil wealth will float a Kurdish state that will
eventually bite off chunks of south-east Turkey. The army is also reasserting
its power ahead of elections precipitated by its clash with the neo-Islamist
government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Crushing the PKK, moreover, is popular with
resurgent Turkish nationalists.
Turkey's
friends, alas, have little leverage. The long alliance with the US is in shreds,
the prospect of EU entry is evaporating. Yet Ankara should think again. Think,
for example, of Israel's futile attempt last summer to crush Hizbollah in
Lebanon. Turkey would risk mayhem on a far greater scale by a massed assault on
the last relatively stable area of Iraq.
Turkey's
Kurdish conflict has not returned to anything like levels that would justify
all-out attack. A sure way of resurrecting the insurgency - as well as visiting
more misery on Iraq - is to invade Kurdistan.
