On December 22-23, 12 Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq were killed by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) guerillas amid the Turkish Armed Forces’ (TSK) military operations targeting Kurdish forces.
Turkey has military bases and guardhouses in Iraq, which the Baghdad government has declared illegal. The raid came amid air strikes and assassinations by Turkish forces and the National Intelligence Organisation (MİT) targeting the PKK and its Syrian ally, People's Protection Units (YPG) militias in northern Iraq and Syria. Hundreds of Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey have been on hunger strike since November 27 demanding improved conditions.
Turkish and U.S. soldiers conduct the joint patrol outside Manbij, November 1, 2018 [Photo: Combined Joint Task Force - Operation Inherent Resolve/Spc. Arnada Jones]
Amid Israel's genocide in Gaza and US preparations for war in the Middle East targeting Iran, rising tensions point to the danger of another war in Syria and Iraq. The Turkish forces intensified air strikes after the raid. The US-backed “Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria” said civilian settlements and infrastructure were targeted.
Turkey's seven warplanes and 33 drones launched air strikes in the area on December 23, killing 8 people, leaving more than 2,000 residents without electricity and targeting hospitals. Thousands of people protested Turkey’s attacks at a funeral in Qamishli.
While Ankara denied targeting civilians, the Turkish Defence Ministry announced that it had destroyed “a total of 71 targets consisting of caves, bunkers, shelters, oil facilities and warehouses,” and “neutralized” 2,201 PKK-YPG members during the year, 81 of them in the last week.
The bloody war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish nationalist forces led by the PKK, now going on for almost 40 years, has been intertwined with the imperialist wars the US has waged in the Middle East over three decades.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government was a key supporter of the CIA-orchestrated regime-change war attempting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, which killed more than 500,000 people. Erdoğan's NATO-backed “peace process” with the PKK collapsed in 2015 when Washington turned the YPG into its main proxy force in Syria.
Ankara was terrified by the prospect of a US-backed Kurdish state emerging in Syria, fearing it could trigger a similar outcome in Turkey. The Turkish government has gone on the offensive against the PKK in Turkey and northern Iraq and the YPG in northern Syria.
Turkey has so far launched three major ground invasions in Kurdish-majority areas of northern Syria controlled by the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). As a result, Ankara now controls an area of 8,835 square kilometres covering more than 1,000 settlements, including cities and towns such as Afrin, al-Bab, Azaz, Jarabulus, Jinderes, Rajo, Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. The Syrian government has repeatedly demanded that Ankara end its illegal occupation in the country.
Turkey aims to prevent Kurdish nationalists from dominating its entire southern border with Syria and to prevent the emergence of a Kurdish state. Ankara has established an occupation regime in these areas, which has displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds during the military invasions. The Erdoğan government has previously announced that it will continue ground operations until it has established a 30-kilometre-deep “safe zone” along the entire Syrian border.
At a UN General Assembly in 2019, Erdoğan announced his plan to resettle three million Syrian refugees, mostly Arabs, who had fled NATO’s regime-change war. He explained his plan, which amounted to an ethnic cleansing targeting Kurds, as follows:
Another important issue is the elimination of the PKK/YPG organization in the east of the Euphrates... Our efforts to create a safe zone are ongoing... Our intention is to create a peace corridor and settle 2 million Syrians here. Once this safe zone is declared, we can settle 1.5-2 million Syrian migrants here... If we can move the depth of this zone to the Deir-u-Zor to Raqqa line, we can increase the number of Syrians returning from other parts of Europe to 3 million.
The October attack on the Turkish National Police headquarters in Ankara, claimed by the PKK, was seen by the Erdoğan government as an opportunity to advance these plans. The Ankara attack was followed by intensified air strikes against Kurdish militias in Iraq and Syria.
Ankara considered turning its escalating military operations into a large-scale ground operation in Syria. However, such an operation was not given a green light by Iran and Russia, which back the Syrian government, and the United States, which supports the YPG. On October 5, the Pentagon announced that a Turkish armed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) had been shot down by US aircraft in Syria.
The Turkish ruling class feared that the US-backed Israeli genocidal war in Gaza could be extended to target Iran and threaten its own interests, so the Erdoğan government was forced to call for “restraint” and temporarily remove from its agenda a full-scale ground operation targeting Kurdish forces that would have increased tensions with Washington.