Iran denies joint operation with Turkey against Kurdish rebels
TEHRAN,— Iran has denied the Turkish Interior Minister’s comments on Tehran and Ankara carrying out a joint operation against Kurdish militants, Fars news reported on Monday.
Hours after Turkey’s interior minister was quoted as saying that a joint operation against Kurdish militants was launched together with Iran, an Iranian official denied any role.
Turkey’s Anadolu news agency had quoted Soleyman Soylu on Monday saying, “We started staging a joint operation with Iran against the PKK on our eastern border as of 0800 (0500 GMT) this morning”.
“We will announce the result later,” he added.
But Iran’s Fars news agency, close to the Revolutionary Guard, quoted a source at the Iranian armed forces saying, “The Turkish army carried out the operation against the militant group PKK, but Iran’s armed forces were not part of the operation”.
Soylu had not specify precisely which PKK bases the operation targeted but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has in the past said it would be against militant hideouts in Iraq.
The Turkish military has often bombed PKK bases in Iraq’s mountainous northern regions as part of its decades-long operations against the group.
Iranian security forces have also fought the PKK affiliate, the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK). Both groups have rear bases in neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan region.
PJAK, is a militant Kurdish nationalist group based on the border areas between Iraq’s Kurdistan region and Iranian Kurdistan region, that has been carrying out attacks Iranian forces in the Kurdistan Province of Iran (Eastern Kurdistan) and other Kurdish-inhabited areas.
Since 2004 the PJAK (Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistane) took up arms to establish a semi-autonomous Kurdish regional entities or Kurdish federal states in Iran, similar to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. The PJAK has more than 3,000 armed militiamen, half the members of PJAK are women.
The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. More than 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels, have been killed in the conflict.
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974 and currently serving a life sentence in Turkey, has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.
(With files from radiofarda.com | AFP | Reuters)
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