ANKARA (Dispatches) – President Tayyip Erdogan has threatened that Turkey will launch incursions deeper in Iraq to target Kurdish militants, a move strongly resented by the government in Baghdad as a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.
Turkish forces have stepped up attacks on bases of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) inside northern Iraq over the last year, focusing their firepower and incursions mainly on a strip of territory up to 30 km (about 20 miles) inside Iraq.
But Erdogan said Makhmour, a camp 180 km south of the Turkish border was an “incubator” for militants and must be tackled.
“If the United Nations does not clean it up, we will do it as a UN member,” Erdogan said, adding that Ankara believed Makhmour posed as great a threat as the PKK’s stronghold in the Qandil mountains further north.
“How long are we supposed to be patient about it?” he told Turkish state broadcaster TRT in an interview late on Tuesday.
A senior Iraqi official told Reuters that Turkey complained last week to Baghdad about “terrorist activities launched by the PKK from their camp in Makhmour against Turkey.”
The camp was established in the 1990s when thousands of Kurds from Turkey crossed the border in a movement Ankara says was deliberately provoked by the PKK.
The PKK, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union, has fought an insurgency against the state in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey since 1984. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
Makhmour was targeted by Turkish air strikes a year ago.
The Turkish army regularly conducts operations and air raids against PKK in southeast Turkey as well as northern Syria and Iraq. Both neighboring countries view Ankara’s operations as violation of their sovereignty.