The photo at left shows a Turkish military convoy heading toward Silopi in southeast Turkey, which is precisely where I crossed the border to Iraqi Kurdistan last year. I may well have been on this very road.
The PKK seems to have borrowed straight from the Hezbollah playbook in staging its Sunday attack and taking Turkish soldiers as hostages, a move guaranteed to inflame the situation. BBC World radio this morning had a PKK spokesperson claiming that Turkey is attacking and the militants are simply defending themselves, but this was called into question by Hugh Pope of the International Crisis Group. (I had a chance to meet Hugh in Istanbul and am currently savoring his book Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World.)
The two leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, are walking a difficult line. They are not PKK partisans, but there are indeed hardline Ocalan cultists in Kurdistan, and not just in the mountains with guns. Talabani has called on the PKK to disarm and leave, but there is a whiff of doubletalk here. On the one hand he says: “The leaders of P.K.K. do exist in Kurdistan’s rugged mountains, but the Turkish Army with all its power could not stem or arrest them, so how can we?” On the other, he says: “We will not hand any Kurdish man to Turkey, even a Kurdish cat.”
Turkey is calling for direct U.S. military assistance in uprooting the PKK, and given how well the mission in the rest of Iraq is going, I’m sure this won’t be a problem (ahem).
My friend Yigal Schleifer has a piece at Eurasianet on the crisis in U.S.-Turkish relations. In the next few days I hope to have time to collect more information on the border standoff.
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