Adding to the woes of the Kurds, Iraq has gone a step further with the help of its neighbour Turkiye, to ban the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on March 14, as the region battles the ever-present instability. The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party has long been the only representative of the Kurdish, a community from the Middle East that has been persecuted by countries such as Turkiye, Syria, and their other neighbours. Recently the EU and the US have also followed suit by labelling the party as a terrorist group. The Kurdish struggle to establish their own state began in the early 20th century after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Since then, many uprisings and rebellions have failed to provide the community with their state, Kurdistan. The ban from the Iraqi government comes ahead of a few trade agreements between the two countries and an upcoming visit to Iraq in April this year by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who wants to launch a huge offensive against the Kurds in Iraq. Erdogan has led an extensive political campaign against Kurds not only domestically but also on the international front against Sweden. Turkey was one of the biggest hurdles for Sweden’s NATO membership as it accused Sweden of giving asylum to PKK terrorists. This added a whole new dimension to this conflict as it came during a time when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was moving closer and closer to Russia, gaining more Eastern European allies and worsening the situation in Ukraine.
As of March 14, 2024, Turkey and Iraq both issued a joint statement declaring the PKK as a banned organisation. The Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Ahmet Yildiz also commented on this decision and said that the two countries are working on key development projects such as the ‘Dry Canal Project’ that aims to connect Turkiye to the Persian Gulf via Iraq through road and rail transport. This project is a turning point in the relations between the two countries which also influences the region's geopolitics.
Turkiye continues to establish its network of bases inside Iraq and also conducts regular airstrikes across the border. Erdogan sees a future where Turkiye continues to dominate the already unstable Middle East and being one of the only allies of the West in this region, it has leverage in such internal issues. A week after the ban, Turkiye also proposed to set up an anti-PKK joint operations centre to which Iraq responded “positively” according to a Turkish official. An issue that began with the Armenian genocide of 2015, where thousands of Kurds were either killed or displaced from their homeland, continues to be ignored by the United Nations which has unsurprisingly stayed quiet on the suppression of the rights of the Kurdish people.
With Israel’s invasion of Gaza and the Houthi rebels attacking commercial ships around the Red Sea, it will be interesting to see how an already unstable region reacts to another bold move by a United States ally. P.C - https://the-cradle-media.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/kurdistan-protests.jpg
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