While the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmarga forces have launched operations from the southeast and northeast respectively into Mosul, the western corridor to Syria remains wide open for the takfiris to escape. Why?
2President Erdogan’s policies are leading toward facilitating the establishment of the Kurdish State in Northern Iraq while he thinks he is undermining the Kurds in Syria and Turkey.
1July’s failed coup attempt in Turkey has exposed more than the coup plotters. Turkish President Recept Tayip Erdogan has realized that Western rulers and Nato members are not his real friends. Russia and Iran are.
The AKP-led Turkish government’s fragile peace with the Kurdish rebel group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has come to an end and revived horrific memories of the past. Since 2009, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had pressed hard to end the ongoing violence in southeastern Turkey. The government’s determined peace negotiations with the PKK initially yielded results and an agree-ment to end the bloody conflict seemed imminent.
The already complicated and volatile situation in Iraq may be about to deteriorate further. After months of escalating tensions along the Iraq-Turkey border, in October 17 the Turkish parliament passed a motion submitted by the government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that permits military strikes on Iraq. The motion, the first of its kind since Turkey’s invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974, was approved by an overwhelming majority of 507 in the 550-member Turkish grand national assembly.
If Turkish editors and commentators are right in their assessment of the effect of Abdullah Öcalan’s conciliatory gestures from prison on popular and establishment attitudes towards Kurdish rights and on the question of whether or not to execute him...
Abdullah Öcalan is a brutal and murderous terrorist. Let us make no bones about that. But the sight of him on television, a pathetic, blindfolded figure paraded for the cameras in front of two large Turkish flags while tens of thousands of Kurds demonstrated their anger at his arrest in cities across Europe, was evocative nonetheless.
The bitter dispute between Italy and Turkey over Rome’s refusal to extradite Abdullah Öcalan, the founder and leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), to Ankara to stand trial on charges of terrorism has dealt a serious blow to Turkey’s relations with the European Union (EU).
