Turks Accuse Iraqi Kurds Of Sheltering Terrorists

By Cernig

A Turkish general has diectly accused Barzani's Kurdish regional government of offering shelter to Kurdish terror group, the PKK, even while the Kurdish authorities have decried PKK attacks.

Gen. Hasan Igsiz, deputy chief of the military, said the Kurdish leadership in northern Iraq was allowing the rebels to use roads and hospitals in the region and ignoring their presence.

"We don't receive any kind of support from the local administration in the northern part of Iraq," Igsiz said. "Our expectation from them is to accept that the terrorist organization is a terrorist organization and eliminate the support provided to it."

Iraq's central government pledged to cooperate with Turkey against the rebels after Friday's attack, which the guerrillas fired mortars and anti-aircraft artillery from Iraqi soil against Turkish targets.

"The Kurdistan regional government denounces the recent PKK attack on Turkish soldiers," it said in a statement dated Saturday. "We condemn this attack and we express our condolences and sorrow to the families of the victims."

The PKK and the Kurdish regional government have one priority goal in common - an independent Kurdish State, at least in all but name if it comes as part of a highly-federalized soft partition of Iraq. There's long been suspicion that the Kurds have been looking the other way on the PKK while publicly saying the right things - but actual aid and shelter would be a very different matter. The US might have to bow to Turkish pressure and ask the Iraqi central government to do something more than just talk - which could flare up the bubbling confrontation over the area around Kirkuk into a shooting civil war.

Or the Turks just might go over the border in force again,this time against the peshmerga as well as the PKK - which would drag in the Iraqi central government on one side or another. (I'm no longer certain Napoleon al-Maliki would back the Kurds, he might see it as an opportunity to rid himself of a block to his own strongman status.) Either way, the US gets to play piggy in the middle between three allies and ends up pissing off, in an extreme and probably deadly way, at least one of them.

Comments

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Supporting the PKK is against the long term interests of a future Kurdish state in Northern Iraq. Especially when one considers the massive amount of Turkish investment in the Kurdistan region. I suspect that the unwillingness of the KRG to confront the PKK has more to do with KDP-PUK rivalry than with anything else. By not confronting the PKK each prevents an alliance between the PKK and its rival. Another example of Jonathan Schwarz's Iron Law of Institutions (SILI).