Erdogan says Turkey to wind down operations in northern Iraq

Yasmeen Altaji | July 13, 2024 | Featured Image/X via @IraqiPMO

Turkey will soon pull back its latest ground operation in northern Iraq, outlets reported Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying.

Reportedly speaking to military academy graduates Saturday, Erdogan said the cross-border Operation Claw-Lock, which Ankara launched in 2022 to target Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants in Iraq and Syria, was a “success” and that Kurdish fighters had been deemed “incapable of acting inside our borders”, according to Al Jazeera English.

Reuters reported Erdogan said, “We will close the lock very soon in the Claw Operation Zone in northern Iraq.” He did not give a timeline for the operation’s closure.

Turkey and the PKK, a Kurdish nationalist politico-militant group established in the 1970s, have long been in conflict. In April, Turkey and Iraq made an agreement that outlined Iraq’s support for Turkey’s pursuit of eliminating the PKK in Iraq in exchange for the latter’s optimized access to water. Outlets have reported Turkish incursion as far as 40km into Iraq.

Turkey’s air and ground operations targeting suspected PKK positions in Iraq have now and in the past struck remote farming villages in the northern part of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, many of them Assyrian.