PKK Attacks Prompt Security Cooperation between Turkey and Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government
By Frank Hyland
By Frank Hyland
The decades-long armed conflict between Turkey and the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan - PKK) has witnessed a number of major policy shifts by key participants in the past year. The greatest such shift thus far - one in the “sea-change” category - may very well sound the death knell for the PKK, already very much on the defensive in its northern Iraqi redoubt. Following a deadly October 3 PKK attack on a Turkish military outpost in Aktutun, no less a figure than Nechirvan Barzani, Prime Minister of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and nephew of long-time Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) leader and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani, stated that the PKK attacks were aimed at harming relations between Turkey and northern Iraq’s Kurds (Hurriyet, October 9). The idea that an Iraqi Kurdish leader would make such a statement would have been virtually unthinkable over the past twenty five years.
The catalyst for the change in the PKK’s political and cultural environment was the Aktutun attack that killed seventeen Turkish soldiers and wounded twenty more, followed shortly after by an attack on a Diyarbakir police shuttle bus that killed six and wounded approximately two dozen others (Hurriyet, October 9; Today’s Zaman, October 9).
The full article may be viewed at http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2374478
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