No Invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan

By Michael J. Totten
I’ve been away from the blog for two days because my friend Judith Weiss came to visit from New York for two days and I took on a road trip around Oregon to show her some scenery. Just as we were leaving the city, Debka reported that 50,000 Turkish soldiers invaded Iraqi Kurdistan.
We found no news on the radio, as if nothing had happened. We had no access to the Internet or international newspapers. I was unable to write about it or even find out what was going on.
It was probably for the best. Sometimes it’s better to wait a day or two before responding to headlines.
My sources in Iraqi Kurdistan told me there has been no Turkish invasion. The Turkish government, the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and the United States government all agree that there has been no Turkish invasion.
Why Debka hasn’t yet been completely discredited as an inadvertent spoof “news” site from an alternate universe is beyond me.
Here’s what’s actually happening: The Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan Worker’s Party (or PKK) from Eastern Turkey has dug into a remote mountainous area just inside Iraq which they use as a staging ground to launch terrorist and guerilla attacks inside Turkey. The Turkish military is shelling the area from their side of the border and may have chased PKK elements across the border in hot pursuit before returning to Turkey immediately.
The KRG says their Peshmerga aren’t able to flush the PKK out of their positions in the mountains because the area is too remote and rugged for a ground force to penetrate. This is the same location where the Peshmerga successfully hid from Saddam Hussein for decades when they waged their own guerilla war against the Baghdad regime.
It’s possible that the Peshmerga are insufficiently motivated to challenge the PKK — which is not officially supported in any way by the KRG — and that Turkey’s military build-up on the border is an attempt to pressure them to do what needs to be done.
I don’t know what KRG officials secretly believe in their hearts about the PKK. None have ever expressed even the vaguest sympathy to me for the PKK even off the record. At the same time, though, there is no love lost between Iraqi Kurds and the Turks. In any case, the Kurds of Iraq never used PKK-style tactics against Arab Iraqi civilians even when they faced genocide from Saddam’s regime. So I am not going to accuse the Kurdistan Regional Government of secretly supporting the PKK. I can’t prove that the KRG doesn’t support them, and I’m not trying to prove it. But I haven’t seen any evidence that the KRG does, and there is some evidence that they do not.
Free advice for the United States government: Help the Kurds of Iraq eject the PKK from the mountains before Turkey does to Iraqi Kurdistan what Israel did to Lebanon. The Turkish government sees this problem through the lens of last year’s war in July, and we don’t need to see that movie again.