Turkey escalates airstrikes on Kurdish targets in northern Iraq

“The Incirlik base agreement has been signed on our part”.

The timing of Turkey’s attacks on Kurdish militants – immediately after opening its air bases to the U.S. – has fueled suspicions of a deal with Washington, but the White House has denied any role. Around half of Syria’s 900 km (560 mile) border with Turkey is now controlled by Kurds.

In the latest raid, Turkish warplanes pounded about half a dozen positions belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a government statement said. Turkey has now agreed to open three airfields not only to the US but to the other members of the coalition as well.

The BBC quoted Kerem Oktem, an analyst at the Center for Southeast European Studies, as saying that Turkish policy was “to pretend that it is waging a war against IS (Islamic State), while at the same time following up on another goal, which is to destroy the PKK”.

“I understand the coincidence of all of this, but it is just that”, said State Department spokesman John Kirby.

She said that attempts to draw new borderlines would not help efforts towards bringing peace and prosperity to the region, which was already suffering from various conflicts and wars. Kurdish rebel attacks have claimed the lives of four policemen, eight soldiers and one civilian in the past two weeks, according to count by the Associated Press. One outside analyst said eliciting such support may have been why Turkey sought the unusual forum in the first place.

“There is no difference between PKK and Daesh“, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Monday, using an Arabic acronym to refer to IS.

Western allies have said they recognise Turkey’s right to self-defence but have urged it not to allow years of peace efforts with the PKK to collapse. But Ankara decided to more broadly cooperate with the US-led alliance fighting ISIS after a suicide bomber belonging to the jihadist group killed 32 pro-Kurdish activists in a Turkish town bordering Syria on July 20.

What makes this Turkish thrust worrisome is that two other Kurdish groups, the “peshmerga” militias of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq and the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units or YPG, have been the most effective ground-force partners of the U.S. campaign against Islamic State.

It is also targeting ISIL in Syria but its campaign against Kurdish militants has been most intense. Locations included the group’s mountainous stronghold in Qandil.

Mr Erdogan said on Tuesday that it was “not possible” to carry on with a peace process in the face of current attacks by the PKK.

All fifteen IS suspects, including 11 foreign nationals, detained in raids at a low-income Ankara neighborhood this week were released, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

It has stopped short of explicitly pulling out of a peace process, although it said on July 11 thatTurkey’s construction of military outposts, dams and roads for the armed forces’ use had violated a ceasefire and that it planned to resume attacks.

A main objective of a Syrian safe zone is to ease the burden on Turkey regarding the mounting numbers of refugees and the continuous influx of Syrians into Turkey. That may reflect the PKK’s greater presence in Turkish society, but Kurdish politicians charge that the government’s objective is to curb the rising political power of the Kurds.