Nevertheless, when Turkey sent some 10,000 troops across its border into northern Iraq on Feb. 21 in pursuit of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels, the world was reminded of Turkey’s geopolitical imperative to contain Kurdish nationalism. The PKK issue is undeniably a national security threat that Ankara must contend with, but the larger issue for the Turks is how to keep Iraqi Kurdistan boxed in.
The Turks have a number of tools at their disposal for this effort. Militarily, Turkey can send thousands of troops into northern Iraq at moment’s notice and work toward establishing a military buffer zone along the border to remind Iraqi Kurds that Turkey is just a hop, skip and jump away from taking action if any bold moves toward expanding Kurdish autonomy are attempted. Economically, Turkey controls the main energy export line out of Iraqi Kurdistan, allowing the Turks to prevent the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) from exporting crude through the 600-mile pipeline that links the giant Kirkuk oil field with the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Politically, Turkey has strategic alliances -- with Iran, Syria and Iraq’s Arab Sunni and Shiite leaders -- that can serve to keep the Kurds in check on issues such as legalizing energy deals and budgeting funds for the KRG.
Turkey also has other, more underhanded, methods of containing the Kurds with the help of its pervasive intelligence network based throughout northern Iraq. Turkish intelligence in Iraq receives a significant level of support from Iraq’s Turkmen population, which numbers around 2.2 million and claims to be the third-largest ethnic group in Iraq (after the Arabs and Kurds). Iraqi Turkmen speak a Turkish dialect and are heavily concentrated in the predominantly Kurdish north. As a Turkic people, the Iraqi Turkmen have very close relations with the Turkish state and are deeply involved in the Ankara-led effort to block the Kurds.
It appears to be more than just a simple coincidence, then, that Turkmen jihadist groups and militias have popped up on the scene in recent weeks, just as the Turkish state was stepping up its military campaign in northern Iraq. On Feb. 15, a group calling itself Katibat al Shahid Sayghin (Martyr Sayghin Brigade) announced its formation in a formal declaration on the Internet. The group identified itself as a Turkmen group based in Kirkuk and claimed it had been fighting the U.S. occupation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it waited until now to publicize itself for fear of endangering the Iraqi Turkmen population. In a reference to the Kurds, the group said it will fight against those in Kirkuk with “suspect plans” and “narrow nationalist agendas” to drive out Turkmen from the oil-rich city.
It should be noted that it is highly unusual for Turkmen to engage in jihadist activity in the first place. The Turkmen population in Iraq, according to some estimates, is about one-third Shiite and the rest Sunni. Iraqi Turkmen are shaped far more by ethnicity than sect or religion and have largely steered clear of the jihadist orbit, raising suspicions as to how this group came about in the first place.
Iraqi Turkmen are also reportedly jumping on the militia bandwagon in Iraq, with Turkmen National Party President Jamal Shan calling for the formation of a Turkmen paramilitary force in northern Iraq during a parliament session Feb. 28. According to Shan, the Turkmen militia would operate from Tall Afar in Ninawa province in the northwest to Mandali in Diyala province in the southeast. The purpose of the force, in his words, would be to protect Iraqi Turkmen from attacks carried out by militias “hostile to the rights of the Turkmen and the unity of Iraq and Iraqis,” another thinly veiled reference to Kurdish intentions to maintain a demographic grip over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
It would not be beyond the pale for the Turkish state to have something to do with this apparent militarization of the Iraqi Turkmen population. Turkish intelligence has in the past created and supported a number of shadowy militant groups to target Kurdish rebels and pro-Kurdish groups in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Though the Turkish state is secular at its core and does not traditionally deal with Islamist militants, it made an exception when it came to fighting against the Kurds.
This was best illustrated in the early 1990s when the Turkish state began supporting a faction of the Turkish Hezbollah (unrelated to the wider-known Lebanese Hezbollah) based out of Batman in Turkey. Though the group claimed it rose to prominence as a challenge to the PKK and its non-Islamist, Marxist values, there is widespread suspicion that this faction of Turkish Hezbollah at the time was a creation of the Turkish state, meant to serve Turkey’s agenda to break up the Kurdish separatist movement. In addition to fighting against PKK rebels, the Islamist group largely targeted journalists, professionals and human rights activists actively working toward the Kurdish cause in the early 1990s. When the killings came to an abrupt halt in 1995, suspicions spread that Turkey had cut off its covert support for the group. But the Turkish Hezbollah was highly fractured and did not dissipate entirely. By 2000, factions of the group stepped up attacks against the Turkish state, prompting a massive crackdown that led most of the Hezbollah rebels to flee to Iran and northern Iraq.
And this is a danger that Turkey has to contend with if it is, in fact, pursuing a strategy to create and support Turkmen militant groups in northern Iraq. Working with Islamist militants is a risky business, and Turkey could end up with bigger security problems on its hands if these groups stray too far from the nest.
Despite the complications, covert support for Turkmen militant forces in northern Iraq makes a good deal of sense for the Turkish state. The militia allows Turkey to challenge the highly trained Kurdish peshmerga forces that patrol the region. This becomes all the more important as tensions escalate over the control and ownership of the prized oil-rich city of Kirkuk, where Turkmen form a significant portion of the population.
Turkey can also use its militant links to carry out attacks -- potentially targeting key energy infrastructure -- to offset the perception that Iraqi Kurdistan is the oasis of war-ravaged Iraq, making it harder for the KRG to continue attracting energy investments as an insurance policy for Kurdish interests. With jihadist activity spreading more and more into the north as al Qaeda in Iraq gets pushed out of its traditional Sunni strongholds, Turkey has enough plausible deniability at hand to keep its distance from any such attacks. The predominantly Turkmen city of Tall Afar near Mosul, in particular, was a jihadist stronghold from 2004 to 2006 and likely has a large pool of militants for the Turks to adopt.
Turkey has the intelligence structure in place for these anti-Kurdish militant groups to proliferate as Turkey steps up its military campaign in northern Iraq this spring. Turkish intelligence will be able to support these militant forces as well as Sunni rebel groups operating in the region. Though Iraqi Kurdistan has reached an unprecedented level of autonomy with the fall of Saddam Hussein, Turkey has no shortage of options at hand to contain Kurdish nationalism.
March 4,
2008: When Erdogan spoke to his party in parliament today, he referred
to “non-military measures” and said: “Combating terrorism is not possible
only with military power. There are diplomatic, economic, political and
social dimensions, and we will continue to take important steps in this
regard.” He was more or less parroting the thesis dictated by Gates, without
further elaboration.
But it was
with a mixture of dismay and relief that the Turkish high command received
its orders to quit Northern Iraq on Feb. 29, a week after embarking on
a major offensive to crush Kurdish rebel sanctuaries. Or as the respected
Turkish columnist Yilmaz Ozdil wrote in the Hurriyet, March 1: “Bush asked
us to get out. We got out.”
But there was
more to the decision for example:
Turkish special
forces failed in their first cross-border engagement on Feb. 25 against
the PKK’s forward camps at Hakurk and Zap in Iraqi Kurdistan. They lost
25 to 30 dead in places only 30 km as the crow flies from the Turkish border
when they were still some 70 km from the enemy’s main havens in the Qandil
Mountains.
From that point
on, as the offensive continued, it became clear to Turkish chief of staff
Gen. Yasar Buyukanit that the army’s main advantage, the element of surprise
against the Kurdish rebels - who did not expect an attack during the heaviest
snow storms of the year in the Kurdish Mountains of Iraq - had become a
two-edged sword. Kurdish generals saw the soldiers held up by snowdrifts
2 meters deep. Even the commandos trained to fight in these conditions
were slowed down. The Turkish advance was therefore stalled before it really
started.
As a result,
the politicians and the generals in Ankara were deeply divided over the
operation’s objectives. The former objected to the latter’s drive to wipe
out as many PKK bases and kill as many men as possible.
They agreed
only on the presentation of the operation as a major incursion into Iraq
for an offensive that would continue without a time limit until the PKK’s
bases were rooted out or its forces surrendered.In actual fact, the scale
of the operation as fairly small, with no more than 100 soldiers assigned
to any single engagement - and sometimes less.
The operation
ended not only humiliatingly for the Turkish army, but under scathing criticism
from the main opposition Nationalist Movement Party in parliament. Thus
also today, its leader, Devlet Bahceli, remarked sarcastically that the
troop withdrawal had been “rather abrupt.” He went on to accuse the General
Staff of giving the enemy inordinate recognition as a legitimate guerrilla
organization, rather than treating them as a bunch of terrorists.
In official
communiqués, he said, the Turkish military spoke of the PKK’s “command
and control units” and “manned anti-aircraft weapons locations.” These
terms are used in reference to an orderly army, said Bahceli, and when
used in relation to the PKK, lent it the significance “it neither possesses
nor deserves.”
As seen by
the PKK, the purportedly fearsome Turkish troops withdrew after a single
battle, cowed by a combination of US pressure and their own misjudgments.
The Kurdish rebels came out on top of an engagement initiated by a pro-American
army and dedicated to fighting terror.
According to
a new principle sweeping the Islamist world today, they did not need to
prevail against the pro-US Turkish army on the battlefield, only stick
to the course of constant, persistent and perpetual combat – including
in their case, more hit-and-run terrorist attacks inside Turkey - until
they grind their enemy down.
Turkish overall strategy remains that it is concerned by the evolution of events in Iraq: the closer Iraq gets to disintegration, the closer the Kurds come to having an independent homeland that could threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity. Turkish military action against in northern Iraq is a bid to keep Iraqi Kurdistan contained.
