In an Al-Monitor article on Dec. 7, Metin Gurcan discusses Turkey’s latest and controversial move near Mosul that aroused the fury of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's government in Baghdad and brought Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani to Ankara. He also supplied invaluable technical details of the military dimension of the move.

Turkey is already entangled in a crisis with Russia that has the potential of escalating dangerously. For many, opening up a new front for controversy — this time with Baghdad — may not seem a wise move, but it needs to be assessed within a broader regional context.

The Turkish move, involving Bashiqa, a town just north of Mosul, does have a rationale in the broader regional framework in which a Russia-Iran axis, also aligned with Baghdad, is overtly imposing itself over Syria. Such an axis would be attractive also for Turkey's Kurdish insurgent Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), whose affiliates the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and People's Protection Units (YPG) are proving themselves as the most reliable and strongest fighting forces on the ground in Syria against the Islamic State (IS).

The PKK and YPG also played an important role in Iraq in the liberation of the town of Sinjar from IS. Sinjar commands the most important road linking Raqqa, the de facto capital of IS in Syria, with its most important reward, Mosul, considered to be a Sunni bastion against the capital, Baghdad, and its Shiite politicians. IS took over Mosul in June 2014.