Prospects of Turkey Invading Iraq

Joshua Partlow's article in the Washington Post this Sunday while it does review the recent history of border incidents between Turkey and the Turkish Kurd rebel group PKK, he misses completely the Turkish perspective. Juan Cole, in his blog Informed Comment, outlines what he over-looked about public opinion in Turkey.

the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq will certainly annex Kirkuk later this year, and that there may be as a result clashes between the Kurds and the Turkmen minority. Iraqi Turkmen, some 800,000 strong, have been adopted by the Turks of Turkey as sort of little brothers. I can't imagine the Turkish public standing for a massacre of Turkmen, and hundreds of thousands of people in the street could force Buyukanit to act decisively.


My colleagues universally agreed that the potential was there for an escalation of the crisis under such conditions. No one said I was exaggerating the risks. One former official who is an expatriate said that before he arrived in Ankara last week, he did not know just how angry people there were over this issue. He is now convinced that the situation is serious.


Partlow points out that if Turkey did take on the Iraqi Kurds over the haven they have given the PKK, the US would likely be forced to support Turkey, a NATO ally acting against a terrorist threat.


Partlow quotes Massoud Barzani as saying that Turkey has a problem with the existence of Kurds. This is a vast exaggeration. The status of Kurds in Turkey has substantially improved over the past two decades. Barzani neglected to mention the 35,000 dead in PKK's dirty war, or that he is actively harboring 5,000 PKK guerrillas. He recently went so far as to imply that if Turkey intervened on the Kirkuk issue, it would result in terrorism in Diyarbakir (a city in Turkey's eastern Anatolia). It was a shameful performance.


So I don't think Partlow's sanguine conclusions are justified. I think the situation in the north has entered a phase of continual crisis in which things could spiral out of control at any moment.


I continue to be just amazed that no one in authority in Iraq is taking any steps to try to avert such a crisis. I earlier suggested a partion of Kirkuk province before the referendum as a way of defusing the tensions. But it seems like that the referendum will be held in the whole province and that the whole of it will go to Kurdistan. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has said that this development would be a cause for war in and of itself.