Turkey’s Erdogan fights the PKK to improve his electoral chances

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On May 13, Turkey put the brakes on Finland’s and Sweden’s bid for NATO membership over Helsinki and Stockholm’s relationship with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed rebel group that has been designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Since the 1980s, the conflict between Turkey and the PKK for greater autonomy for the Kurds of Turkey has caused thousands of victims and led them to establish a network of affiliates in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Although Ankara has already softened its stance on NATO expansion – the latest chapter in its balancing act between traditional Western allies and President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, perhaps – the clashes with the armed movement Kurds along Turkey’s southern border have recently intensified.

Confrontations between Turkey and the PKK on this front have traditionally been justified by the Turkish government’s counterterrorism narrative that the withdrawal of any PKK presence along the country’s southern border is imperative for Turkish security.

What is different this time is that Turkey’s military interventions in northern Syria and Iraq as well as its demagoguery around Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO membership have potentially profound national implications. As Turkey faces one of the worst economic crises in two decades and faces waves of anti-refugee sentiment, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expects a tough general election to be held in June 2023. The Turkish president uses the conflicts with the Kurds of the armed movements to improve his position in his country and to secure new sources of investment, currencies and energy likely to help him to be re-elected.

On May 13, Turkey put the brakes on Finland’s and Sweden’s bid for NATO membership over Helsinki and Stockholm’s relationship with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed rebel group that has been designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Since the 1980s, the conflict between Turkey and the PKK for greater autonomy for the Kurds of Turkey has caused thousands of victims and led them to establish a network of affiliates in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Although Ankara has already softened its stance on NATO expansion – the latest chapter in its balancing act between traditional Western allies and President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, perhaps – the clashes with the armed movement Kurds along Turkey’s southern border have recently intensified.

Confrontations between Turkey and the PKK on this front have traditionally been justified by the Turkish government’s counterterrorism narrative that the withdrawal of any PKK presence along the country’s southern border is imperative for Turkish security.

What is different this time is that Turkey’s military interventions in northern Syria and Iraq as well as its demagoguery around Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO membership have potentially profound national implications. As Turkey faces one of the worst economic crises in two decades and faces waves of anti-refugee sentiment, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expects a tough general election to be held in June 2023. The Turkish president uses the conflicts with the Kurds of the armed movements to improve his position in his country and to secure new sources of investment, currencies and energy likely to help him to be re-elected.


On the Iraqi front, Turkey is strengthening its alliance with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which controls northern Iraq, by negotiating a new energy agreement. Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, these energy relations have become even more important. As Turkey seeks to diversify its energy portfolio in various directions, the recent discovery of vast untapped natural gas reserves east and south of Kirkuk, Iraq, is just another reminder for Ankara that the KRG is an important strategic partner.

On April 18, the Turkish Armed Forces launched a military offensive in northern Iraq, codenamed Claw-Lock. This operation targets PKK forces operating in tunnels, caves and bunkers in the area between Metina and Zap in the Qandil Mountains in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The PKK has used northern Iraq as a base from which to attack Turkey for decades.

Although the Peshmerga (the Kurdish branch of the Iraqi army) denied having cooperated with the Turkish army on this offensive, the KRG’s ruling party, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP), did not condemn the operation. In fact, Operation Claw-Lock was preceded by high-level contacts between Turkey and the KRG, which share the goal of limiting the PKK’s role in northern Iraq – and which also reached an agreement profit for the export of oil from Kirkuk and Erbil in Iraq to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in 2014.

Despite Turkey’s continued interest in this prospect, the export of Kurdish gas to Turkey and then Europe faces many obstacles: rivalries and infighting within the Kurdish camp, tentative timetable for increasing production on the Kurdish and ambivalent relationship between Ankara and Baghdad.

This last point is crucial: for the energy agreement to work, all the parties involved will have to work together, which will not be easy because the Iraqi government has disputed the legitimacy of the Ankara-Erbil energy agreements. Turkey has already reached out to the United States to smooth things over with the Iraqi government, and other developments point to possible direct cooperation between the two capitals. Shortly after Operation Claw-Lock began, the Iraqi government deployed troops to the Sinjar district on the Iraq-Syria border. Baghdad has denied coordinating its intervention with Turkey, but shares Ankara’s goals in Sinjar: both sides want to limit the role of the various militias operating in the region that have ties to Iran.

In this scenario, another factor that could bring Ankara and Baghdad together is their turbulent relationship with Tehran. Withdrawing the militia from Sinjar and establishing a new energy deal would restrict Iran’s access to Syria and diminish its role as a regional energy supplier.


Syria is another region where tensions between Turkey and the PKK have recently increased.

Since 2016, Turkey has come to directly or indirectly control large swaths of Syrian territory along the Syrian-Turkish border. The rest of the border regions are administered by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group that aims to create a secular, autonomous government in northeast Syria and is dominated by a Syrian Kurdish militia. Turkey considers this militia as one and the same with the PKK: in recent years, differences over support for the Syrian Kurds have been one of the main points of contention between Ankara and Washington.

Since launching Operation Claw-Lock in northern Iraq, Ankara has intensified its attacks on Kurdish militia targets in northern Syria, launching repeated drone strikes and killing several operatives. . But pushing Kurdish forces and citizens away from the border isn’t the only factor motivating Turkey’s presence in northern Syria: Ankara has created de facto states in territories it controls where it could relocate Syrian refugees of Sunni Muslim origin currently living in Turkey.

Turkey hosts 3.7 million registered Syrian refugees in addition to nearly 2 million other foreigners. In recent months, episodes of racism have become increasingly frequent, including a violent riot against a Syrian community in Ankara last summer, with resentment against refugees exacerbated by the country’s economic crisis. Many Turks perceive Syrians as job stealers and privileged access to health care and education.

The refugee issue has been at the center of Turkish political debate for almost a decade, but taking advantage of public opinion, the opposition has been hitting harder than usual on this point in recent weeks. A 9-minute dystopian mockumentary called ‘Silent Invasion’, which shows Syrian-dominated Turkey in 2043, has been wildly popular, racking up over 4.5 million views on YouTube in less than a month and helping to frame the debate over migration as a matter of ‘national survival.’ A new far-right anti-refugee party has emerged and the rest of the opposition have once again pledged that, if elected, they will sack all refugees in Syria from here two years.

Responding to this pressure, Erdogan has intensified his rhetoric on refugees. On May 3, in a video message delivered on the occasion of the opening of a briquette house camp in the Syrian district of Idlib, the Turkish President announced that the government was working on a “new project that will allow the voluntary return of 1 million [Syrians]to safe areas that Turkey controls in northern Syria.

As the debate over voluntary relocations continues, Turkey is working to achieve another important strategic objective. If Sunni Muslims are relocated to northern Syria, the Kurdish populations living there will be diluted. The hope in Ankara is that this demographic re-engineering will prevent the emergence of a Syrian Kurdish proto-state and thus guarantee Turkey’s long-term security.

If the military operations in northern Iraq and Syria are successful, Erdogan will not only have created a strip of PKK-free land along his southern border. He will also have cemented Turkey’s energy cooperation with the Iraqi Kurds and brought about a solution to the refugee issue that he can capitalize on with voters. At a time of economic hardship and as he faces the toughest re-election campaign of his political career, these measures will improve Erdogan’s electoral chances.

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