Baghdad's new approach to Turkey's offensive in Iraqi Kurdistan

A new Turkish military offensive launched last month has surged deep into Iraq’s Kurdistan Region amid intense fighting with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Nearly 200 families have evacuated their villages in affected areas in Duhok governorate as the fighting moves out of the mountains and gets closer to more densely populated areas.

Turkey has encroached on Iraq’s territory for years. It operates a network of bases in the Kurdistan Region and regularly conducts cross-border airstrikes, which all too often kill civilians.

Iraqi officials sometimes complain about violations of their country’s sovereignty, but Baghdad appears to be showing a new level of tolerance in the face of the current offensive.

This shift in attitude follows high-level efforts to improve bilateral relations with Ankara and promises to cooperate on security and economic matters.

On 22 April, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan travelled to Baghdad for what some observers saw as a transformative visit. Among the more than 20 agreements that were signed, the most important agreement was the Development Road, a $17 billion road and rail route from Basra to the Turkish border. The effort is also backed by the UAE and Qatar.

Security issues were a major part of Erdogan’s visit. In advance of the trip, Baghdad formally declared the PKK to be a banned organisation for the first time on 14 March. It did not declare it as a terrorist group, as Ankara had hoped, but the move was certainly a sweetener.

Iraq’s lack of capacity to confront either the Turkish army or the PKK in the rugged terrain of the Kurdistan Region remains an important factor in its reluctance to confront Ankara.

“In the minds of the Baghdad government, it is not within their capacity or interest to prioritise” preventing a Turkish incursion, Zmkan Saleem, an associate fellow with Chatham House, told The New Arab.

“They have other things to worry about,” Ali added, arguing that Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s government was focused on showing that it could provide political stability inside federal Iraq, improve access to water and public services for its citizens, and boost trade.

Even as relations with Baghdad seemed to warm, the Turkish leadership was nevertheless focused on the apparent threat of the PKK on the Iraqi side of its southern border. For much of the year, Erdogan threatened a major offensive that would “permanently resolve the issue concerning our Iraqi borders,” as he put it in a speech on 4 March.

The offensive did not materialise in the spring, but military activity rapidly escalated in mid-June.

For the most part, Iraqi officials have sidestepped the issue of the conflict. On 24 June, Muhammad Abdul Wahab Sukkar, the commander of Iraq’s Border Forces Command, told Iraqi state-owned media that a joint-coordination centre had been established with Turkey to deconflict their forces.

“We have reached positive results initially on the subject of coordination…There is seriousness,” Sukkar added.

On the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington, DC, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein told reporters that “Turkey has not conducted any attacks or military operations. What we have observed are merely minor troop movements, which have been occurring since 1991”.

In contrast, Turkish statements were far more aggressive.

“We are fully determined to create a 30-40 km deep security corridor along our Iraqi and Syrian borders and to completely clear the region of terrorists,” Güler said in an interview with Politico on 8 July.

Kamran Osman, a member of the war monitor group Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), told The New Arab that 184 families were displaced by fighting since 15 June and eight villages were evacuated from the Bari Gare and Barwary Balla areas of Amedi district.

Since the 1990s, when Turkey began cross-border operations against the PKK, residents have been forced to abandon a total of 170 villages because of the conflict, Osman added.

The present offensive appears designed to cut the link between PKK-controlled zones on Metina and Gara mountains. This would set up more extensive operations against Gara, a long ridge that runs east to west about 30 kilometres inside Iraqi territory. It is home to a major PKK presence and was the site of a bloody, three-day Turkish raid in February 2021.

So far, only two civilians are reported to have been harmed. A man and a girl from a group of pastoralists in Sidekan in nearby Erbil governorate were injured in Turkish shelling on 12 July, according to local reports. However, the risk that locals become caught up in the crossfire grows each day as Turkey pushes closer to more densely populated areas.

"Iraq's lack of capacity to confront either the Turkish army or the PKK in the rugged terrain of the Kurdistan Region remains an important factor in its reluctance to confront Ankara"

On 10 July, a shell landed in the Guharze village, which lies on the main road in the northern Duhok governorate. No one was killed or injured, but angry residents staged a protest to demand an end to the fighting.

Security forces associated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which controls Duhok and is a close ally of Turkey, arrested a team of journalists to prevent them from covering the protest.

The KDP not only plays a role in supporting the Turkish operations but has its own interests in terms of larger intra-Kurdish politics. It has violently clashed with the PKK, with the most serious recent episode coming in 2021.

“The PKK sees the KDP as an ally of Turkey, while the KDP sees the PKK as a challenger for Kurdish leadership in Iraq and across the region,” Ali said. So far, the fighting has been between the Turkish military and the PKK, but open conflict between the two Kurdish groups could add to the instability.

Fire is also a major risk and causes significant economic damage to the mountain farms and orchards that locals depend on for their livelihoods. Summer in the Kurdistan Region is hot and dry, so explosions and rocket fire spark wildfires that race across the grasslands and can burn for days.

According to Osman, approximately 6,747 hectares of land have burned since 15 June.

“This war has been going on for decades, but they are now closer to populated areas. The scale - of the technology, the drones, the attacks, the bombings - is quite a lot for the people and it actually increases insecurity,” Ali said.

As the fighting has become more publicly apparent, the Iraqi government’s rhetoric has begun to change. On 10 July, Iraq’s National Security Council rejected the “interventions and violations by Turkish forces in the shared border areas” and called for Ankara to “diplomatically engage” with Baghdad on the issue.

If history and circumstance are any guide, these statements are likely empty gestures designed to appease domestic critics like Qais al-Khazali. On 13 July, the Asaib Ahl al-Haq leader condemned the Turkish offensive by warning “against attempts to exploit this as a pretext to occupy parts of our country,” referring to the PKK’s presence in the Kurdistan Region.

Without any substantive diplomatic or military action to prevent Turkish violations, the military incursion will continue, with the people of the Kurdistan Region increasingly exposed to the conflict.

The war “used to be restricted to the mountainous, remote areas where one of the problems was that no one knew what was going on in terms of the fight between the PKK and the Turkish army,” Ali said.

“The positive was that it was a bit far from populated areas, villages, and districts, but now this is changing. To me, to everybody else, especially to the people of Duhok, this is quite alarming.”

Winthrop Rodgers is a journalist and analyst based in Sulaymaniyah in Iraq's Kurdistan Region. He focuses on politics, human rights, and political economy.

Follow him on Twitter and Instagram: @wrodgers2