Sinjar on brink of major conflict between PKK, Turkey
The city of Sinjar, west of Mosul, seems close to becoming a battleground for armed confrontations between the PKK and the Turkish army, especially after Ankara called for ground intervention against PKK fighters in Sinjar to prevent them from having a new base in the north of Iraq.
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq — In a May 8 meeting with the Turkish ambassador in Baghdad, Iraqi Vice President and prominent Sunni leader Osama al-Nujaifi said that the role of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Iraq is destructive and the PKK is a threat to the region, just as the Islamic State is.
Iraqi officials and authorities have been stressing the need for diplomacy to deal with any Turkish intervention in Iraq following April 25 air raids by Turkish forces on the PKK headquarters in the Sinjar Mountains. However, Sinjar District member of parliament Majed Sinjari did not rule out armed confrontations between the two sides should Turkey hit Iraqi territory in the future.
Sinjari told Al-Monitor, “Escalation and one-upmanship will occur to the detriment of both sides. If the attacks are repeated and Turkey makes a ground intervention, the rhetoric will change and there will be armed confrontations.”
The Iraqi government and parliament, the Peshmerga Ministry in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and many other political forces condemned the Turkish raids on Sinjar, which also targeted peshmerga forces' sites located near the PKK headquarters, killing five peshmerga fighters and wounding nine others.
