“The last thing that Iraq wants at the moment is another war,” said Andrew Lee Butters in Time magazine, “but that may be what it’s about to get”. An ambush by the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which killed 12 Turkish soldiers at the weekend, has helped reignite a decade-long conflict between Turkey and Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. With 100,000 troops massed along the Iraqi border and the government in Ankara voting 507 to 19 in favour of military action, Turkish troops and warplanes made several sorties into Kurdish-controlled Iraq this week, killing 34 PKK rebels and bombing villages in the mountainous region. The conflict has already helped drive oil to an intraday high of $90 a barrel, due to fears that the pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea will be disrupted.
The offensive followed a week of diplomatic scrambling by the American and Iraqi governments to prevent action against the PKK rebels. The Americans, understandably, are desperate for the Turkish military not to upset a region that passes for the only reasonably stable part of the country. But they will also fear that the attack will set a dangerous precedent for Iran to take the same action against PKK rebels based on their border with Iraq – drawing the US army into a conflict with Iranian troops. “A Turkish offensive would be a nightmare for the US,” said Patrick Cockburn in The Independent.
But Turkish air strikes alone are unlikely to achieve anything against the PKK rebels, according to Cockburn. The 3,500 rebels are well dispersed across the region and it would be easy for them to disappear in the notoriously rugged mountain terrain. The Turks have already made a total of 24 airstrikes into Iraqi Kurdistan since 1984 with the backing of Saddam Hussein, but with little effect.
The Kurdish rebels – who in recent years have stepped up their violent struggle for an independent state carved from the Kurdish communities in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria – will know that they can continue to stoke nationalist protests in Turkey by parading the eight Turkish hostages they seized in last week’s ambush. Frustrated by the US and Iraqi government’s failure to root out the PKK, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan may feel that the economic sanctions he has threatened this week are not enough. “With war drums beating, and a public hungry for revenge, it would take a major military move by the US to stop an imminent incursion,” said Pelin Turgut in Time.