Turkey says Iran has offered verbal support for its latest offensive against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels scattered across the forbidding Qandil Mountain range separating Iran from Iraq. Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli told the state-run Anadolu news agency in a wide-ranging interview today, “Our offer to Iran was to carry out the operation together. Iran, in its remarks at least, has voiced very important support.”
His comments came a day after Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that the operation against Qandil had started with 20 Turkish fighter jets destroying 14 PKK targets in the region.
In fact, a Turkish military operation against the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan was already underway with Turkish troops deployed roughly 30 kilometers (nearly 20 miles) in the Harkurk region that falls northeast of Qandil. But “the big one” — a full-scale assault presumably involving ground forces taking on the mountain bases proper — has yet to begin. There is widespread skepticism that conventional methods could work against the guerrillas, who have a wide network of hideouts buried in the bowels of the craggy mountain chain, prompting speculation that Turkey's bellicosity is more about vote-grabbing in the run-up to the June 24 polls. Many of their camps are mobile. And Qandil town, which is de facto administered by the PKK — a giant portrait of the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan stares from a mountain face at its entrance — is populated with hundreds of civilians.
Canikli told Anadolu that the PKK was using these civilians as human shields. “Qandil and the entire region will be expunged of terror … including villages because the terrorists live together with the villagers; this is their strategy. … Naturally we will carry out our operations without harming the civilian population. We are very experienced in this matter.” Turkish airstrikes have in fact caused civilian deaths over the years, provoking a local backlash. But the Iraqi Kurdish government, which relies heavily on Turkey to sell its oil, has for the most part held its tongue.
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