ANKARA: Turkey’s military now has a green light to chase Kurdish guerrillas into northern Iraq, but the approach of winter and fears of getting bogged down in mountainous terrain severely limit its options.The Ankara parliament approved a motion on Wednesday giving NATO’s second biggest army free rein to pursue Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters based in mainly Kurdish northern Iraq, which they use as a launch pad for attacks on Turkey.
“If they are going to do a major operation they don’t have much time. We are talking weeks before weather conditions get bad. It has already begun snowing there,” Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based expert on Turkey’s military, said.
The powerful army will want to avoid getting bogged down in a protracted fight against veteran guerrillas in difficult terrain the PKK has been in command of for several years.
NJ Gohel, director of the Asia Pacific Foundation, an independent security and intelligence think-tank, said that to be effective, the Turkish military would have to go at least 60kms deep into northern Iraq.
“That would be dangerous as they would get sucked into a guerrilla war very quickly,” he said. “The PKK units are very mobile. The Turks would be chasing an invisible enemy that blends in with the local population and has mountainous hideouts.”
“Past experience has shown in Vietnam and Afghanistan, not to mention Iraq, that a conventional army is very ill-equipped to fight a guerrilla war,” he said.
With the onset of winter, analysts say, Turkey’ options will be reduced to air strikes and commando raids.“We may see air strikes and special teams going in for cleanup operations, but a major cross-border operation doesn’t look likely now,” said Milliyet newspaper columnist Semih Idiz, who added that the army did not want to be bogged down in a long war in Iraq and risk its strong domestic reputation.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has played down expectations of an imminent attack. The United States and Western allies, as well as Iraq, have urged Turkey to refrain from military action.
A recent rise in PKK killings has put Erdogan under pressure from the army, opposition parties and the public to eliminate some 3,000 rebels believed based in northern Iraq.
Military sources based in the southeast of Turkey said 70,000-100,000 troops were now in the border region.
“We have made all the necessary preparations for a possible cross-border operation. The Turkish army is ready,” said a top military official in the southeast.
“Turkish soldiers are ready for any kind of operation at any time,” he said.
Turkey keeps a relatively small contingent of troops at several bases in northern Iraq dating back to the time of previous offensives in the 1990s.
Analysts expect Erdogan to hold off on an incursion until he has seen whether U.S. and Iraqi authorities can show concrete results that they are trying to crack down on the PKK.
“The first and foremost coded message... is an appeal by the AKP government to both the U.S. and the Iraqi governments -- and perhaps the local northern Iraqi Kurdish leadership -- to do something on the PKK and remove the reason for a cross-border operation demanded by the Turkish military and the public before it becomes too late for Turkey to take a step back,” wrote columnist Yusuf Kanli in the Turkish Daily News.
The deaths of more than a dozen soldiers this month has shifted the public firmly in favour of a military option in northern Iraq despite the international opposition.
“A limited military operation would serve as proof that Turkey isn’t bluffing and it would give them time to hammer out a deal with other countries to prevent the PKK from returning to the offensive in the spring,” Jenkins said.
Underscoring the strength of national feeling, a stadium announcer at Wednesday night’s European championship qualifier against Greece called out the names of soldiers killed in a recent PKK attack.
Turkish supporters chanted “martyrs do not die, the nation cannot be divided” during the match.
Ankara blames the PKK for the death of more than 30,000 people since the group launched an armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey in 1984.
Turkey’s large-scale incursions in 1995 and 1997, involving an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 troops respectively, failed to dislodge PKK rebels from the Iraqi mountains.
Analysts say Turkey will be at a disadvantage compared to the 1990s when it had some support from local Iraqi Kurdish factions. Ankara’s relations with the Iraqi Kurdish regional authority are now poor and it can expect no help from them.
—Reuters