Erdogan meets Iraqi president as Turkey launches strikes on PKK
ISTANBUL,— Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met his Iraqi counterpart Barham Salih on Tuesday while the Turkish military launched an operation against Kurdish militants in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The two leaders held talks in Istanbul before attending a Ramadan dinner together.
A picture on the Turkish presidency’s official website showed Erdogan and Salih gathering around a round table together with their wives.
The visit came as the Turkish military launched an air and ground offensive in mountainous Iraqi Kurdistan against the hideouts of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Special forces and combat drones were also involved in the offensive which started late on Monday, the defence ministry said in a statement.
The operation aims at eradicating “caves and shelters used by terrorist groups”, it said.
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.
Turkey and the PKK have been engaged in fierce fighting since a fragile ceasefire broke down in 2015.
Turkey allowed imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to meet his lawyers this month for the first time in eight years.
Some 3,000 Kurdish activists on Sunday ended a months-long hunger strike against Ocalan’s prison conditions after the militant leader urged them to stop it, through the lawyers he met in his prison island near Istanbul.
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.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | AFP
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