In Turkey: Government says Iraq’s negative attitude towards air strikes on PKK

Turkish jets again pounded PKK targets in northern Iraq in an operation Thursday that lasted two and a half hours, a government official said.

Suspected PKK gunmen fired on police headquarters in the city of Pozanti, sparking clashes which left two police as well as two militants dead, the Anatolia news agency said.

In a separate incident on Thursday, a railway worker was killed in a shootout between Turkish security forces and PKK militants in Kars province in northeastern Turkey.

The chairman of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition HDP party, Selahattin Demirtas, whose lawmakers Erdogan wants to see prosecuted for alleged links to the PKK, called for an immediate halt to violence on both sides.

However, Dlawer Ala’Aldeen – president of the Erbil-based Middle East Research Institute and a former minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq – said that Washington’s support for Ankara’s renewed war against the PKK was likely a concession that allowed the US to use its Incerlik air base for missions against ISIL.

There is only one problem with this story: The main target of Turkey’s offensive has not been ISIS but, rather, the sole force in the region that has proven effective in combating ISIS-the Kurds.

Many in Diyarbakir blame President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the ceasefire collapse, accusing the Islamic-rooted ruling Justice and Development party of not doing enough to protect the Kurds in Suruc from last week’s bomb attack.

“If the aim, as stated by the government, was to clear the border of the IS threat, the operation against IS in Syria appears to be weak and ineffective”, said Serkan Demirtas, columnist for Hurriyet Daily News.

Bakir said he was unable to provide figures on the numbers of people displaced or wounded. Since the United States views Kurdish fighters as its substitute troops on the ground, Turkish attacks against Kurds would undermine U.S. military objectives in the region.

But so far air strikes had targeted mainly the PKK, which is itself bitterly opposed to IS, raising tensions in Turkey with its large Kurdish minority. One of the PKK fighters was also reported killed in the fighting, and Turkish forces are conducting searches in the surrounding area trying to locate the rest.

A peace process for a final settlement aiming to end the PKK s 30-year-plus armed uprising for better rights and powers for Turkish Kurds is now under severe strain.

Four years into a war that has killed more than 220,000 people, Assad can no longer defend the whole country or hope to regain lost territory and his forces are retreating and fortifying their core strongholds, from the capital Damascus up to the coastal strip in northwestern Syria.

Some lawmakers are concerned Turkey, a close U.S. ally and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member might be working as a rogue fighter in what should be a cohesive effort to defeat the Islamic state.

Of the 1,302 people arrested in what officials have described as a “full-fledged battle against terrorist groups” in recent days, 847 are accused of links to the PKK and just 137 to Islamic State, government spokesman Bulent Arinc said.