Turkey has been mak­ing noises that the Iraqi Kurds should not get too hope­ful about estab­lish­ing a quasi-​independent entity in the three gov­er­nates they con­trol in north­ern Iraq. Now, it looks like Turkey is ready to back up their words with force. (At least they’re con­sis­tent.) How­ever, there is an elec­tion com­ing up in Turkey, so the pos­si­bil­ity that this is all fod­der for domes­tic con­stituen­cies can­not be ruled out.
On the they-​really-​mean-​it side of the equa­tion, Ara​bic​News​.com is report­ing that Turk­ish deputy prime min­is­ter Doulat Bah­jali said that his coun­try must recon­sider its stance regard­ing north­ern Iraq. Since 1991 when it got dragged into Oper­a­tion Pro­vide Com­fort (the allied estab­lish­ment of the north­ern no-​fly zone to pro­tect Kur­dish refugees from the 1990 – 91 Gulf War,) Turky has gone back and forth in its rela­tions with the PUK and KDP. At times the rela­tion­ship was warm enough that Barzani and Tal­a­bani, the lead­ers of the respec­tive par­ties, trav­eled under Turk­ish diplo­matic pass­ports.
That has appar­ently ended with final­ity after the Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment con­vened its par­lia­ment in Octo­ber and intro­duced a pro­posal for a fed­eral repub­lic of Iraq with a Kur­dish entity in the north and with Kirkuk as its cap­i­tal. Kirkuk, rich in oil and his­tory is home to Kurds, Arabs, Assyr­i­ans and Turkomen, to whose defense Bah­jali is leap­ing.
“The pres­sures which are imposed on the Turkomen under Sad­dam Hus­sein were great and that they are at the mean­time exposed to a new threat by the two Kur­dish lead­ers Masoud al-​Barazani and Jalal al-​Talabani tar­get­ing their cities of Mosul, Kirkuk and Arbil,” Ara​bic​News​.com says. (Ed. I changed some spellings of towns in this quote.)
This backs up the it’s-all-politics argu­ment, since the Turkomen are a nat­ural ally of Bahjali’s National Move­ment Party, and bash­ing the Kurds is always a sure­fire way to rally the nation­al­ist faith­ful. How­ever, Turk­ish defense min­is­ter Sbah Eddin Oglo said Oct. 14 that Turkey intends to estab­lish ‘a secu­rity belt’ in north­ern Iraq and that intel­li­gence agen­cies have reported that Turkey has increased its troop strength in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan from 4,000 to 10,000 troops.
All of this must be dri­ving the United States crazy. The last thing it needs is a Kurdish-​Turkish dis­pute in north­ern Iraq just when it’s try­ing to get its ducks in a row should shoot­ing start. And this is exactly the kind of chaos var­i­ous pun­dits have pre­dicted would hap­pen if Sad­dam is removed and regional rival­ries are allowed to flare. But wasn’t that sup­posed to hap­pen after a war?
Keep watch­ing the Turks. They hold the key to all of this.