Turkish Troops Mass at Iraq Border for Possible Strike

Filed under: Iraq, Kurds, PKK, Turkey — Michael van der Galien, Editor-in-Chief on June 3, 2007 @ 6:07 pm CEST

Turkey is preparing to strike against the PKK:

From south and north, Iraq’s Kurdish region felt pressure from two sides, as saboteurs bombed a vital bridge link to Baghdad, and Turkish troops across the border massed for a possible strike.

“We won’t allow it to be turned into a battleground,” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday of the relatively peaceful Iraqi north, a haven for anti-Turkish Kurdish guerrillas…

In an interview taped for broadcast Sunday on ABC-TV’s “This Week,” Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, said Iraqi leaders had convinced the Iraq-based militants to cease their attacks, “and they did it.”

Al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, ending a visit to the Kurdish north on Saturday, also sought to ease the growing tensions.

“If there are some problems, we should not rely on weapons and threats, or use violence and power because this will increase tension and deepen problems,” he told a news conference in the regional capital of Irbil.

My prediction: Turkey will go in, destroy quite some PKK camps and withdraw before things truly get messy. The US will say that Turkey has to withdraw ASAP, behind the scenes, however, Rice et al. will tell the Turks that they have a certain amount of time to do what must be done. Al-Maliki et al. will threaten, but will not do much. Turkey will be out of Iraq within a couple of days time.

That’s the positive version: the negative version is that things will go terribly wrong; that the Kurds will unite and fight against the Turks; that Iraq will declare war; that Iran thinks it can do the same and attack Kurdistan as well; that the US will fight against Iran; that, in the end, we will have US vs. Iran; Iran vs. Kurdistan; Kurdistan vs. Turkey with the US in the middle and Northern Iraq will be destroyed.

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1 jpe

June 3, 2007 @ 7:43 pm CEST

The negative option might have an unintended silver lining: nothing unites people quite like war. National identities are forged in conflict, so a Turkish invasion might go some way toward doing that, which in turn could ameliorate the Sunni-Shia conflict.

2 mvdg

June 3, 2007 @ 7:54 pm CEST

JPE: that is most certainly true. Ironically, that is exactly what happened in Turkey after (and during) WW1.

3 C Stanley

June 4, 2007 @ 12:18 am CEST

And to some extent, Iraq was more nationalistic when it was fighting Iran during Saddam’s reign (though some of the ‘unity’ was via Saddam’s iron rule too).

4 mvdg

June 4, 2007 @ 8:31 am CEST

Again true Christine although… are you sure that the Iraqi Shiites supported the war against Shiite Iran?

5 domajot

June 4, 2007 @ 12:25 pm CEST

The Kurds uniting to fight Turkey seems like a real and horrible possiblility. It would draw everyone else into the conflict, whether they like it or not.