Kurds Bank On Stability To Stave Off Incursion
By Steve Negus
The Financial Times
October 16 2007
Kurdish officials in Iraq on Tuesday said they continue to hope Turkey will not
launch significant strikes against rebels in their territory, in spite of a
debate today in the Ankara parliament that could lead to the authorisation of
large-scale cross-border military operations.
A spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government claimed that it would not be
in Turkey’s interests to disrupt northern Iraq by launching such an attack, and
called for political negotiations to resolve the crisis.
The relatively muted response may be based on the calculation that Turkey would
not want to destabilise the Kurdish autonomous region – the most secure in Iraq
– on its border. However, it might also reflect the belief that the mountainous
terrain of northern Iraq and the oncoming winter will limit the size of any
Turkish attack.
Turkey’s parliament is expected to vote on a measure that would authorise the
country’s military to launch a cross-border incursion against the PKK, or
Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara says uses bases in northern Iraq to
attack Turkish targets.
A spokesman for northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government argued that the
Kurdish autonomous zone provides a “buffer zone” that protects Turkey from the
chaos of southern and central Iraq.
“We hope that they will not go for a move that would destabilise our region,”
Khaled Salih, the KRG spokesman, said.
He said that during the 1990s, Turkey supported the Kurdistan zone by allowing
the US to use airbases on its territory to protect the Kurdish territories from
attack, and said that it was still in Turkey’s “national interests” that
northern Iraq remain stable. Turkish companies are among the largest investors
in the Iraqi north, which is undergoing an economic boom.
The Turkish army has already staged cross-border shellings and sent small
numbers of troops into Iraqi territory in pursuit of PKK fighters, and Kurdish
officials might be calculating that any future operations would not be
qualitatively different.
While the PKK controls several small enclaves on the Turkish border, its main
stronghold in Iraq is near Mount Qandil on the Iranian border, nearly 100km from
Turkish territory through narrow mountain tracks.
Moreover, the approach of winter weather might mean that there is only a month
or two before many of those passes are choked by snowfall. This could limit the
Turkish military to airstrikes, helicopter operations and other limited missions
in remote and sparsely populated border regions.
Iraqi Kurdish leaders say they have no love for the PKK, a formerly hardline
Marxist organisation that once condemned Iraqi Kurdish parties as traitors.
However, they say that they have no wish to commit their own troops to claw the
PKK out of its mountain valley bases on behalf of Turkey, and say that Ankara
should seek a political rapprochement with the PKK.
The Iraqi Kurdish leadership has relied on Baghdad to take the lead in talks
with Ankara, presumably so that their Arab compatriots view the Turkish military
threat as a matter of Iraqi national sovereignty rather than a strictly Kurdish
issue.
