Kurd Sellout Watch, Day 143

Turkey is offering troops, with big conditions

The Turkish interest in entering Iraq consists mainly in keeping a tight leash on the Kurds, whose ambitions for autonomy—even when expressed, today, as a limited form of autonomy within the state of Iraq—are seen as a threat to peace in southern Turkey. This threat is not purely imaginary; the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a violent and radical Kurdish group, fought a guerrilla war against Turkey for many years in hopes of carving out a separate Kurdish state there, and the PKK maintains some presence in Iraqi Kurdistan. But the Turks define the enemy with a broad brush, encompassing not just the PKK but all Kurds. They demonstrated this earlier this month when the United States captured 11 Turkish special forces who reportedly had sought to assassinate the new Kurdish governor of oil-rich Kirkuk (a city that Turkey desperately wants to see kept out of Kurdish hands, but that Kurds regard as their Jerusalem). Letting Turkish troops into northern Iraq, then, could very easily create a bloodbath. We must not do it.