Ankara is preparing to launch a military incursion into northern Iraq to target the PKK, writes Gareth Jenkins from Istanbul Turkey began massing troops on its border with Iraq last week as the international community scrambled to prevent a full-scale Turkish invasion striking at camps belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq. On 21 October an estimated 200 PKK militants overran a Turkish military outpost at Daglica, 4km from the Iraqi border. Twelve Turkish soldiers were killed, 16 wounded and another eight taken prisoner in the largest PKK action in a decade. The Turkish military claims the assailants crossed the border with Iraq and then retreated back to Iraqi territory. Turkish authorities subsequently said they had killed 32 PKK militants and had shelled PKK positions in northern Iraq. On 24 October it was reported that Turkish F-16 planes had carried out bombing raids 40km deep into northern Iraq. The claims have not been independently verified. The attack on Daglica was the latest in a series of attacks by the PKK. On 7 October, 13 Turkish commandos were killed in the Gabar mountains in southeast Turkey when they were ambushed by PKK militants. On 29 September, 12 male villagers were massacred close to the village of Besagac, near Turkey's border with Iran. Seven of the dead were members of a pro- government militia known as "Village Guards". The escalation in the PKK's insurgency seems to be part of a strategy to increase public pressure on the Turkish government to launch a full-scale military invasion of northern Iraq in the hope that the international community will then intervene and persuade Turkey that the solution to the PKK's 23-year-old insurgency lies in negotiation rather than armed force. There is little doubt that the PKK has succeeded in the first of its aims. In the wake of the attack on Daglica tens of thousands of Turks staged protest marches calling for revenge and a military strike against PKK camps in northern Iraq. The streets of Turkey's major cities were festooned with the national flag, television channels cancelled entertainment programmes and Turkish pop stars announced they had postponed concerts out of respect for the families of the dead. More worryingly, there are signs that nationalist sentiments are beginning to boil over. The offices of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) were trashed by mobs in towns across Turkey. On Monday shops owned by ethnic Kurds were looted in the city of Bursa. On Tuesday two nationalists, armed with a shotgun, set up a roadblock in the Mediterranean city of Osmaniye and threatened to shoot anyone who did not chant "Damn the PKK". The majority needed little encouragement. When the police arrived to take the two into custody, bystanders applauded the demonstrators. On 23 October Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babajan presented a list of demands to the Iraqi government during a series of meetings in Baghdad. They include a crackdown on PKK activities in northern Iraq and the extradition of PKK leaders to Turkey. Later the same day Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki announced that the Iraqi government would ban the PKK. While they might delay Turkish military action Iraqi promises are unlikely to prevent it. The government in Baghdad has little practical influence in northern Iraq, which is administered by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). Under pressure from Ankara, the KRG has occasionally shut down offices used by the PKK in northern Iraq, only for them to reopen later under a different name. And the KRG has always refused to move against the PKK in the Qandil mountains claiming -- with a degree of justification -- that it lacks the resources to launch an effective military operation against the camps. However, the KRG has also allowed the PKK to source most of its supplies from northern Iraq and, providing they do not do so in military units, PKK militants have long been able to travel around northern Iraq at will. As the Turkish military build-up on the Iraqi border continued, Washington has tried to dissuade Turkey from launching a military strike, asking Ankara to postpone an incursion to allow for a diplomatic solution. Many Turks are infuriated that it has taken the threat of an invasion to galvanise Washington into action against the PKK and protests by US officials that a Turkish invasion could cause casualties among the civilian population of Iraq have been greeted with a mixture of fury and derision inside Turkey given the casualties caused by the US invasion. Amid popular pressure for an invasion of northern Iraq, some Turkish analysts have argued that military action alone will fail to eradicate the PKK. During the 1990s the Turkish military launched a series of incursions into northern Iraq which, though they undoubtedly inflicted damage, killing PKK personnel and destroying supplies, failed to deter the insurgency. Many PKK militants hid in the caves that riddle the mountains of northern Iraq while others withdrew south. Once the Turkish army left they returned, regrouped, rebuilt and restocked and within a few months the PKK's military capabilities were restored to pre-invasion levels. Sonmez Koksal, the former head of the Turkish National Intelligence Organisation (MIT), has warned that military action can have only a limited impact. "During some air-raids the terrorists would play music and sing in shelters 20 metres below the ground," he said. "It is not easy to clean out these caves one by one." Cengiz Candar, one of Turkey's most seasoned commentators on foreign affairs, says that any attempt to follow a military strike by setting up a security zone along Turkey's border with Iraq could backfire. "When it invaded Lebanon in 1978, Israel formed a security zone. The result was the birth of Hizbullah," he notes. "Trying to eliminate terror by cross-border operations will affect all processes and you will end up with very different results than the ones you expected. Israel's adventure in south Lebanon is the best example." (see p.2)
