Turkey’s months-long military operations in border areas on Iraqi Kurdistan soil have turned up pressure on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has long used the region as a base in its armed campaign against Ankara, pushing the militants to move deeper into Iraqi Kurdistan, where their presence is causing friction with local Kurds and fanning fears of renewed Kurdish fratricide.

Tensions spiked in mid-October, when special forces under the direct command of Masrour Barzani, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), moved northeast of Dohuk to encircle Gare Mountain, which is one of the PKK’s camp areas in the region. After special forces deployed to at least 10 localities, commando units set up checkpoints in the area, according to Kurdish media outlets. 

Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Iraqi Kurdistan’s dominant political force, was already under fire for siding with Turkey after it deployed peshmerga forces in April to a flashpoint area west of the Qandil Mountains, home to the PKK’s headquarters. The two sides stepped back from the brink of armed confrontation, but Erbil’s Oct. 9 accord with Baghdad further irked the PKK. The accord — an attempt to stabilize the Yazidi-populated Sinjar region near the Syrian border — aims to end the PKK presence there and marginalize PKK-linked Yazidi groups. Ankara has warned it will not let Sinjar become “a second Qandil,” carrying out several air raids in the area, wary of the foothold the PKK has gained in Sinjar since coming to help the Yazidis against the Islamic State in 2014. 

Simultaneously, the PKK was accused of assassinating a senior Iraqi Kurdish security official in his home in a village near Dohuk Oct. 8, a claim the group denied. Later in the month, Kurdistan’s Security Council announced that 17 suspects, among them a dozen with PKK links, had been arrested for plotting attacks on diplomatic missions and businesses in the region. Yet council members representing the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — the KDP’s main political rival, which has been on better terms with the PKK — said they were not aware of such plots.