On Saturday, Kurdish protesters in northern Iraq briefly
entered a Turkish base after Turkish airstrikes had killed Kurdish civilians
last week.
The rare protest comes amid rising tensions in the region as
Turkey seeks to strike at the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Iraq and Syria.
This puts the autonomous Kurdish region in a bind. On the one hand, it wants to
support the civilian protesters; on the other hand, it wants amicable relations
with Turkey to prevent the PKK-Turkey conflict from inflaming regional
tensions.
Established in the 1990s, the Kurdistan Regional Government
(KRG) saw many years of instability when the leading Kurdistan Democratic Party
(KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) fought a civil conflict.
The Kurds had emerged from the terror of Saddam Hussein’s
regime to enjoy a respite of sorts in a region that had been targeted by
Saddam’s genocidal chemical attacks and depopulation efforts in the past. Along
the border with Turkey, more than 600 villages had been abandoned by Kurds as
Saddam sought to move them into towns and keep an eye on the restive region.
As the 1990s became the 2000s, a new conflict elbowed its
way into the region. The PKK was fighting the government in eastern Turkey and
had set up bases in the mountains of northern Iraq. Turkey, which had hosted
many Kurdish refugees during the Saddam era, sent its troops into Iraq. It
expanded its operations after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam.
Just as the KRG was expanding its economy and becoming the
most peaceful region of Iraq, free from insurgents, Turkey expanded operations
in 2007.
Between 2013 and 2015, Turkey and the PKK held a ceasefire.
The KRG, content to be rid of the Turkish-PKK fighting that had afflicted the
region, was then faced with a massive attack by ISIS in August 2014. Thousands
of Kurdish Peshmerga died in the subsequent battles with ISIS.
The KRG and its president, Masoud Barzani, enjoyed a warm
relationship with Turkey during this period. Kurdish officials regularly
visited Turkey, meeting with foreign minister and then Prime Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu and also with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. These high-level
meetings took place from 2013 to 2017.
In 2017, the Kurdish flag was even raised at the airports in
Ankara and Istanbul, and was present alongside the Iraqi flag at meetings.
Turkey had difficult relations with Iraq at the time and Iraq opposed Ankara
building a base at Bashiqa on hills overlooking Mosul, where Turkey was
training local Arab forces.
But things soured in September 2017 when the KRG held an
independence referendum. KDP offices were closed in Turkey, and Ankara worked
with Iran and Iraq to oppose the KRG’s independence efforts. Turkey even
stopped flights to Sulimaniyah, the city where the PUK is strongest. There were
threats to the KRG economy, which has survived on oil and other exports, as
well as imports via Turkey.
This year, things appeared to be on the verge of being
patched up. But Turkey drives a hard bargain. With the PKK-Turkey ceasefire in
tatters since 2015, Ankara has increased its campaign against the PKK. It
launched airstrikes in Sinjar in April 2017 and August 2018 to strike at what
it says are PKK units among the Yazidis on the Sinjar Mountains. It increased
its operations in the KRG’s mountains and even near Erbil, the capital.
Ankara said it had 11 bases in northern Iraq in the summer
of 2018. Many of these consist of hill forts, with HESCO-style barriers, tanks
and vehicles. The overall number of Turkish soldiers is not known.
The war with the PKK is largely fought in the shadows in
northern Iraq. Sometimes, Turkish F-16s also target what Ankara says are PKK
positions. In December they struck at an outpost close to a refugee camp near
Makhmour, a half-hour drive from Erbil.
In general, Turkey has been careful not to kill local
civilians, but the KRG feels caught in the middle. KRG Peshmerga, the armed
forces of the region, were killed in the 2017 Sinjar air strikes. On January
23, two Kurdish men journeyed from their village near Diraluk in a bucolic
valley, to tend their bees on a hillside; they were killed in an airstrike.
Locals say four more men were also killed last week.
This led to anger in Diraluk and Shiladze, a nearby village.
These villages mostly support the KDP, which has traditionally had warm
relations with Ankara. Some are also supporters of the KIU Party, a Kurdish
party influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. But the locals, who are not PKK
supporters, were so outraged that they marched toward the Turkish base with
black banners calling on the PKK and Turkey to end the war in their area.
Based on conversations with locals, the protesters were
initially peaceful, but some youth threw stones and Turkish soldiers responded
by firing in the air. Enraged, the protesters burned the Turkish army vehicles.
This was embarrassing for Ankara. Its soldiers fired at the feet of the
protesters and two protesters were reportedly killed.
But the KRG has now been criticized for its reaction.
Instead of condemning Turkey, its statement blamed outside hands for inflaming
the crowd, while also expressing sympathy for the victims. The statement hinted
that the KRG was holding the PKK responsible.
Locals say that the situation is difficult. They want the
war to end in the mountains so that the KRG can improve its economy and so that
Turkish forces will withdraw. They also oppose Turkey’s crackdown, but they
wish the conflict would remain on Turkey’s side of the border.
The KRG can’t force the Turkish army to leave. Baghdad has summoned
the Turkish ambassador in the past and complained again this week, but Iraq has
no power to control its own airspace or to keep Turkey from hunting the PKK in
Iraq. The KDP and PUK – the leading parties of the KRG – have difficult
relations with the PKK, but they are against an internal Kurdish conflict. This
leaves the status quo as is, where Turkey and the PKK hold sway in the
mountains near the border, while locals, who tend to support the KDP or PUK, go
about their life.
With Turkey vowing to clear eastern Syria of the Kurdish
People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara says is part of the PKK, the
region may be inflamed by a larger Turkey-PKK war again. Ankara has vowed to
eradicate the PKK, including in Afrin where it launched an operation in January
2018. It also wants to remove what it says are PKK elements from Sinjar and
other areas in northern Iraq.
Neighboring countries and the international community do not
oppose Turkey’s efforts, leaving local governments like the KRG having to balance
the powerful Turkish army with their own desire to maintain stability. After
the protests this weekend, the situation remains on edge.
