A spate of high casualty PKK attacks have forced Turkey to finally abandon its refusal to engage directly with the Iraqi Kurds, Gareth Jenkins reports On Tuesday, two high level Turkish officials flew to Baghdad to meet with Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at the start of what appears to be a new Turkish policy of engagement with the Iraqi Kurds in an attempt to eradicate the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has its main camps and bases in the mountains of northern Iraq. The visit followed recent PKK attacks inside Turkey. On 3 October, 17 Turkish soldiers were killed in a PKK assault on a military outpost in the village of Aktutun, close to the Turkish-Iraqi border. It was the highest Turkish death toll in a single incident since the PKK returned to violence after a five-year lull in June 2004. A few days later, on 8 October, the PKK demonstrated its ability to strike in urban areas when it ambushed a bus carrying police personnel in the heart of the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, killing six. Both attacks appear designed to demonstrate that, nearly one year after the US lifted its opposition to Turkish cross-border military strikes at PKK camps and bases in northern Iraq, the organisation remains as strong as ever. The attacks in Aktutun and Diyarbakir were a major psychological blow to the Turkish government and military, both of whom had repeatedly claimed that the regular air raids into northern Iraq had so damaged the PKK that it was on the point of collapse. On Friday, Turkish officials announced that Ankara was preparing to initiate what they described as a "sustained dialogue" with the KRG in an attempt to persuade the Iraqi Kurds to increase the pressure on the PKK from inside northern Iraq, such as preventing its militants from moving through the lowlands of northern Iraq and using its hospitals and airports. Until relatively recently, although it had repeatedly demanded a crackdown on the PKK presence in northern Iraq, Turkey had refused to engage with the KRG directly. Ankara has never made a secret of its suspicions that the Iraqi Kurds are using the autonomy of the KRG in northern Iraq as a stepping stone to a fully independent Kurdish state, something which Ankara fears would inspire separatist sentiments amongst its own already restive Kurdish minority. Perhaps not surprisingly, the KRG has been less than enthusiastic about meeting Turkey's demands, and always insisted that it lacks the military resources to move against the PKK bases and camps, which lie deep in the mountains in very difficult terrain. The first sign of a softening of Turkey's stance came in February this year when Murat Ozcelik, special envoy to Iraq at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, met with the local governor in the province of Dohuk in northern Iraq and Safeen Diyazee, the external relations director of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which is one of the coalition partners in the KRG. However, on Tuesday, Ozcelik reportedly flew to Baghdad with Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's chief foreign policy advisor, who currently plays as great a role in shaping Turkey's foreign policy than Ali Babacan, the country's foreign minister. Ozcelik and Davutioglu were expected to meet with KRG President Barzani. It would be the first meeting between Barzani and a high- level Turkish delegation in four years and comes amidst rumours in the Turkish press that President Abdullah Gul may consider attending the opening of a new airport in the KRG capital of Arbil. Over the weeks and months ahead, Turkish officials are likely to take every opportunity to remind their Iraqi Kurdish interlocutors that the new policy of engagement should not be interpreted as a weakening of Turkish opposition to the creation of an independent Kurdish state. But, even if they have been unwilling to say so publicly, the new initiative also appears to be a tacit admission that, contrary to the expectations of many Turks, cross-border operations alone are insufficient to cripple or eradicate the PKK; and that Ankara needs the help of the KRG. Whether or not the KRG will be able to deliver is currently unclear. Wracked by persistent allegations of corruption and nepotism, and unable to deliver basic services, the KRG is likely to face a domestic political backlash if it accedes to Ankara's demands. Although many Iraqi Kurds have little love for the PKK itself, they regard it as waging a legitimate struggle for the rights of their fellow Kurds across the border in Turkey. Cracking down on the PKK, at a time when there is still no indication that the government in Ankara is willing to relax the many restrictions on Kurdish cultural and political rights in Turkey, is unlikely to endear the KRG to its own ethnic Kurds. For PKK sympathisers in Turkey, the lesson of the Aktutun and Diyarbakir attacks is not that Ankara should seek assistance in its efforts to eradicate the PKK but that the entire strategy of using force to suppress expressions of Kurdish nationalism is futile. "In the last 200 years, there have been 29 Kurdish uprisings, first against the Ottomans and then against the Turkish Republic," said Nejdet Atalay, the local head of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) in Diyarbakir. "The latest one -- the one led by the PKK -- has lasted for 24 years and force has failed to suppress it. All that has happened has been that thousands of lives have been lost. It is time for the Turkish government to seek a political solution and agree to negotiate with the PKK."
