NATO’s second-largest army is currently pursuing a clandestine war of occupation in Iraqi Kurdistan. After forty years of conflict with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which espouses a unique ideology based on devolved, women-led direct democracy, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sworn a final war against the group this summer.

The region’s mountains have long proved a stronghold for Kurdish militants, particularly since the PKK withdrew its forces into Iraqi Kurdistan following a 2013 cease-fire agreement with Turkey. But those peace talks collapsed — and the retreat brought no respite, as Turkey has pursued the PKK with air strikes often launched hundreds of miles from Turkish soil.

The latest operation is Turkey’s deadliest Iraqi venture in the twenty-first century, with technological advances creating a sea change in the war. In an unprecedented escalation ongoing since April, hundreds of civilian villages have been emptied as Turkish warplanes pound the region. Turkey has penetrated ten miles deep into Iraqi territory, establishing over seventy bases and operating its own checkpoints in what for the first time appears as a de facto occupation.

Turkey claims its air strikes will protect it against Kurdish militants. But to Zagros Hiwa, a spokesperson for the PKK’s umbrella political organization, the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), “National security is an argument used by Turkey to camouflage its genocidal campaign against the Kurds.”

This hidden war is largely kept from Western eyes, with foreign press rarely if ever gaining access to isolated regions under military control. Whereas the PKK’s ideological counterparts in Syria are directly allied with the United States in the fight against ISIS, the PKK itself is a banned guerrilla organization that garners little international sympathy. Yet, the violence here only compounds the more familiar suffering of Kurds living in Iraq, Turkey, and across the border in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and will send shock waves throughout the Middle East.

And there is also another plan at work here. The military operations are intimately linked to Turkish efforts to establish a “Development Road” ultimately intended to link Baghdad and Ankara to Europe, giving Turkey the upper hand in a complex regional power struggle at the cost of Kurdish civilians and the left-leaning Kurdish movement. The ultimate goal: to strengthen Erdogan’s stranglehold on the region.

Air War

Ever reliant on Islamist ethno-nationalism to appease his voters, autocratic President Erdogan has this year pledged to create a twenty-to-thirty mile-deep “security corridor” along Turkey’s vast border with Iraq and Syria. Turkey has already occupied swathes of Syrian Kurdistan, killing hundreds and displacing hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Arabs, Christians, and Yazidis. Kurdish representatives fear Erdogan now aims to repeat the feat across the border in Iraq.

According to regional watchdog Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), the Turkish operations in Iraq have already displaced 162 Kurdish villages, with 600 more at risk. Over a hundred civilians have died during Turkish drone and air strikes on Iraqi Kurdistan in recent years. Iraqi Kurdish activist Kamuran Osman describes scenes of devastation in the conflict zone: “These [villagers] are the people who have to pay the cost and leave the area. When you visit, you can see burned black land. . . . Those who have been displaced have zero support. Turkey is targeting the infrastructure of the area to push people out and have a clear battleground to fight the guerrilla.”

For KCK spokesperson Hiwa then Western powers’ complicity in these attacks, including proliferating deadly drone and military technology to Turkey is particularly reprehensible since “Turkey attacks those places which have been and still are the hubs of resistance against [ISIS] . . . all under the cover of NATO.” In 2014, the PKK collaborated with the United States to save the Yazidis from genocide at ISIS’s hands in the religious minority’s ancestral homeland of Sinjar. But a decade on, Turkey’s occupation of adjoining regions of western Iraq once again places the Yazidis’ fragile survival under threat. Turkish air strikes regularly target Yazidi forces and leaders in Sinjar, on the basis of their alleged links to the PKK.

If Turkey is able to gain dominance in eastern Iraq, Yazidi leaders rightly fear an ISIS resurgence. In Syria, Turkish-occupied regions are already hotbeds of Turkish-sponsored Islamist activity, where scores of former ISIS militants and commanders operate with impunity as part of US-sanctioned Islamist militias. In Iraq, villages and churches belonging to the region’s equally embattled Christian minority have also been razed in the latest violence. And these humanitarian costs are just the tip of the iceberg.

Impunity

Actions like air strikes against the Yazidis would surely be a scandal, were another state launching air raids against the genocide survivors. But Erdogan has Western powers dancing to his tune. The Turkish leader has long sought to position himself as NATO’s key interlocutor in the Middle East, leaning on his dealings with Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, and Iran in order to present himself as an indispensable middleman and thereby extract military and economic concessions from the West.

Decisively, this also means a green light for his ceaseless operations against the Kurds, with Turkey granted carte blanche for military operations into sovereign neighboring states. This was painfully brought home following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when Turkey demanded US permission for fresh aerial assaults against the Kurds in exchange for allowing Finland and Norway to join NATO.

“Turkey has long depended on its geostrategic position . . . in order to advance its interests and get other countries to turn a blind eye on its aggressions,” says Hiwa.

Land Grab

For its part, the Turkish government claims its operations are solely intended to eliminate the PKK and the existential threat posed by what it describes as a “terroristan” on its southern border. But although PKK attacks on Turkish territory have dwindled to almost nothing, the Turkish operations continue more fiercely than ever. A similar pattern repeated itself following the PKK’s 2018 withdrawal from Sinjar, with Turkish strikes continuing regardless. As in Rojava, democratic, left-wing Kurdish politics creates the perfect foil for Erdogan to pursue an aggressive, irredentist foreign policy program aimed at securing predominance in a rapidly evolving Middle East.

Turkey’s military operations will therefore ultimately serve to entrench a permanent, though likely clandestine and informal, Turkish military and intelligence presence in northern Iraq, likely reliant on a network of proxy forces and granted an informal green light by Turkey’s Western allies. Footage of Turkish soldiers stopping Kurdish traffic and checking IDs deep in nominally sovereign Iraqi territory has confirmed fears of a permanent occupation. Osman even describes opening his cell phone only to be greeted by messages from Turkish telecommunications towers now set up on Iraqi Kurdish soil.

Costs of Occupation

This occupation will have consequences on the region and far beyond. Within the semiautonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), analyst Kamal Chomani of Leipzig University warns, “The Turkish operations are once again bringing back the prospects of civil war between the Kurds . . . for the first time in years.” Turkey’s anti-PKK operations are occurring with the support and collusion of the region’s governing Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), a reactionary, oil-rich clan that enjoys deep links with Erdogan’s Turkey — including a long-term oil trade linking both the KDP and Erdogan to Israel.

“KDP is a patrimonial political party led by a tribal oligarch, while ideologically the PKK holds progressive ideals opposing the very foundations of the KDP,” Chomani explains. Turkey hopes to manipulate the KDP’s governing elite to serve its own agenda, even at the risk of what Kurds call “şerê birakujî” — a “fraternal war” which would destroy the region’s fragile peace.

On the national Iraqi level, the federal government in Baghdad has repeatedly protested Turkey’s actions, but its complaints fall on deaf ears. The United States is planning an imminent withdrawal from Iraq, and Turkey is once again using its NATO member status as a smoke screen to justify its occupation of fatally weakened neighboring states. “The operations highlight Iraq as a failed state that cannot preserve its authority . . . [a] foreign country has occupied Iraq’s land and killed its citizens, but Iraq remains unable to take any action,” says Chomani. “It is a moral responsibility of the US to not let Iraq’s territory be occupied by a NATO ally.”

But a potential electoral victory for Donald Trump would likely only hasten an exit inevitable even under Kamala Harris. With US influence waning, Ankara feels more emboldened than ever to become a new occupying force in Iraq – and Syria. A US withdrawal will therefore bring no respite to Kurds or other ordinary Iraqis. As spelled out in the pro-Trump “Project 2025,” the United States will rely more than ever on Ankara to do its dirty work in the Middle East, spelling misery for Kurds and other minorities and driving sectarian Sunni-Shia violence.

Development Road

Turkish analysts make no bones about the link between the supposed security operations in Iraq and Turkey’s future economic interests. The operation’s “most important aim” is explicitly described as securing the future of Turkey’s Development Road — a $17 billion Turkish megaproject that should ultimately link Baghdad through Ankara to Europe.

Turkey is touting this endeavor to Western leaders as an alternative to the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a trade route itself mooted as linking the East through Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Israel — while bypassing both the Houthi-blockaded Red Sea, and Turkey itself. Erdogan reacted angrily to this other plan, vowing to establish an alternative that would enable Turkey to maintain its regional dominance. To Hiwa, therefore, Turkey’s invasion is in large part a “step to get full control of most areas around this road and present it as a secure alternative road to IMEC.” Indeed, to achieve this goal then Turkey is even willing to court its on-off enemy Iran, ever more dominant in Iraq through its own network of proxy militias. This once again gives the lie to Washington’s wrong-headed reliance on Turkey as a regional security partner.

Naturally, this “development” is strictly in Turkish interests. Even Turkey’s own clients in the Iraqi-Kurdish KDP are being excluded from the Development Road, leaving the region’s strongmen leaders clamoring for inclusion. Hiwa points to Turkey’s long-term throttling of the water flow through the crucial Euphrates and Tigris rivers into Syria and Iraq as proof positive that Turkey has no genuine interest in developing an impoverished region struggling to recover from a decade of war, only securing its own trade interests. “Turkey wants to loot Iraq’s resources and turn this country into a market for Turkish goods,” he says.

In particular, Turkey views Iraq’s oil-rich, multiethnic Kirkuk, home to a large Turkmen minority, as its rightful territory. In the further event of a US exit from Syria, securing access to eastern Syrian oil fields currently held by the region’s Kurdish-led, multiethnic Autonomous Administration would be the icing on the cake.

Zone of Occupation

It is not guaranteed that all this will come to pass. Turkey’s megaprojects do not always come to fruition, previous proclamations of the PKK’s incipient defeat have regularly fallen flat, and the ultimate outcome in Iraqi Kurdistan is yet to be determined. But to understand Turkey’s long-term vision for Iraq and the wider Middle East, we need only look at its preexisting zones of occupation in Syria. There, Erdogan has driven out Kurds and other minorities, installing a patchwork of Sunni Arab and ethnic Turkmen proxy militias implicated in a broad range of war crimes against minorities, women, and other Syrian civilians, while looting the region’s limited resources.

In this light, descriptions of the Development Road project as built on Turkey’s establishment of “a direct connection with Turkmens and Sunni Arabs” can be given a less euphemistic name. This is, in fact, about the direct or indirect ethnic cleansing and economic exclusion of the region’s Kurds and ethnic minorities. In their place, loyal proxies (including subservient Kurdish forces) will terrorize and repress the local population. All this is meant to facilitate Turkey’s efficient extraction of profits — and its tactical geopolitical alignment as the West’s attack dog in the Middle East. Given Turkey’s ever more transparent imperial aspirations, it’s not only the Kurds on the receiving end of the latest air strikes who have reason to fear such an outcome.

By Matt Broomfield

Jacobin