Turkey, Iran plan joint operation against Kurdish PKK rebels: minister
Suleyman Soylu, Turkey’s Interior Minister at the Presidential Palace, in Ankara, July 9, 2018. Photo: AP
ISTANBUL,— Neighbours Turkey and Iran will carry out a joint operation against Kurdish rebels, state-run Anadolu news agency quoted the interior minister as saying on Wednesday.
“God willing, we will carry out a joint operation against the PKK together with Iran,” Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said, referring to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party listed as a terror group by Ankara and Western allies.
Soylu did not specify which PKK bases the planned operation would target but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has previously said it would be against militant hideouts in Iraqi Kurdistan Region.
Turkey has battled the PKK for decades, while the Iranian security forces have also fought its affiliate, the Kurdish Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK). Both groups have rear bases in neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan.
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.
In 2017, Erdogan said a joint Turkish-Iranian operation against Kurdish militants was “always on the agenda”.
He added that the two countries’, military chiefs had discussed how to work against Kurdish militants, but Iran’s Revolutionary Guards denied that at the time.
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.
The Turkish military has often bombed PKK bases in Iraqi Kurdistan’s mountainous regions.
Despite backing opposing sides in the Syrian conflict, both neighbours, which see themselves as historically powerful regional leaders, have recently been working with Syria-regime backer Russia towards a political solution to the crisis.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | AFP
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