Turkey’s Sinjar strikes carry stern messages to Tehran, Baghdad
As the United States braces to withdraw its combat forces from Iraq, the country’s Kurdistan Region is emerging as the scene of a mounting struggle for control between Turkey and Iran.
Turkey’s back-to-back air raids in Iraq’s Yazidi region of Sinjar this week resonate as stern messages to Tehran and Baghdad as the Turkish-Iranian rivalry appears to escalate on Iraqi territory, increasingly drawing in the Iraqi Kurds.
The two deadly strikes, which came ahead of a planned regional summit in Baghdad, targeted the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS), a Yazidi militia created after the Islamic State’s (IS) brutal onslaught on Sinjar in 2014 with the help of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the armed outfit that has long fought Ankara and is designated as a terrorist group.
Ankara and Tehran are both irked by each other’s moves in their common neighbor Iraq. Ankara is wary of Iran extending its influence to Kirkuk and Mosul via its allies in Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), while Tehran is annoyed that Turkey’s pursuit of PKK militants has led to an expanded Turkish military presence and de facto buffer zones in the region.
For Ankara, the sole aim of its military operations — extending from the mountains along Kurdistan’s northern frontier to Sinjar on the Syrian border — is to eliminate PKK elements who have long used northern Iraq as a springboard for attacks on Turkey. From Ankara’s vantage point, the YBS is a PKK offshoot, no matter that it was created against IS, is made up of Yazidis and is part of the PMU.
