Barham Salih meets Erdogan as Turkey launches strikes on Northern Iraq
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met his Iraqi counterpart
Barham Salih on Tuesday while the Turkish military launched an operation
against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq.
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 northern Iraq against the hideouts of the
outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), listed as a terror group by Ankara and
its Western allies.
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.
Turkey and the PKK have been engaged in fierce fighting
since a fragile ceasefire broke down in 2015. The insurgency has claimed tens
of thousands of lives since the group took up arms in 1984.
Turkey allowed imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to meet
his lawyers this month for the first time in eight years.
Some 3,000 Kurdish prisoners 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.