On Nov. 16, 2013, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan presided over a mass wedding in the Kurds’ informal capital, Diyarbakir, amid piercing ululations and wild applause. Massoud Barzani, the then-president of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, and two celebrated Kurdish crooners shared the stage. It was an electrifying moment, one that captured the new spirit of peace between Turkey and its estimated 16 million Kurds. Talks between the Turkish government and imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan to end the now 37-year conflict between Turkey and Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were in full swing. A mutually observed cease-fire was in place.

For Siwan Perwer, whose nationalist songs have inspired millions of Kurds, it was the first time he was setting foot in his native Anatolia after 37 years of political exile. “When I left this place, I was a young man. Now I have returned an old man,” Perwer said. Erdogan “is the architect of this day of peace,” he added, as Erdogan’s wife, Emine, teared up with joy.

Last week, Perwer, now 65, was singing a markedly different tune. At a news conference in Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, Perwer joined fellow Kurdish performers in calling for Kurds to unite against “the enemy.” It was, he cautioned his Iraqi Kurdish hosts, “working on invading this part as well.” Perwer was talking about Turkey’s ongoing military offensive against the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan, part of an escalating, multipronged campaign spread across Turkey, northern Syria and northern Iraq, which began after the peace talks and the 2½-year cease-fire collapsed in July 2015. As the PKK camp sees things, Turkey’s goal is to destroy the Iraqi Kurds’ constitutionally enshrined autonomy and to make sure their Syrian brethren never get anything like it.

Turkey invaded northern Syria twice, in January 2018 and October 2019, wresting hefty chunks of territory from Kurdish control. But the bulk of its firepower is trained on the PKK’s mountain hideouts in Iraqi Kurdistan long used by the rebels to attack Turkey. The human toll both among rebels and civilians caught in the crossfire is mounting daily. But so too is the political cost to Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) as it faces mounting discontent over widespread corruption and economic hardship pervading the entire region.