Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed, the First Lady of Iraq, has issued an urgent appeal to the West over Turkey’s ongoing invasion of her native Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Writing in Newsweek magazine, Ahmed lays out the devastating humanitarian toll and political risk of Turkey’s de facto occupation of swathes of Iraqi Kurdish territory, urging the “international community” to “take the proper actions”, while calling on her own federal government to “unequivocally reject the growing Turkish occupation of our country and make it clear to Ankara that its military presence is illegitimate [and] its forces have no authority to displace our citizens from their homes and villages.”
Describing the impact of the invasion, Ahmed writes: “Kurdish and Assyrian villagers fear mortars and constant gunfire, and many report that they have been warned by Turkish soldiers to evacuate their homes within 24 hours or face forced removal and bombardment by the Turkish army.” She cites “verified reports of mass displacement” and statistics from the Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT) showing that Turkey has launched more than 800 attacks on the KRI in 2024, while official KRI statistics show that more than 500 villages had already been depopulated as of 2020.
These crises are contributing to a “new displacement crisis” to a country that has suffered repeated war and destabilisation in recent decades, Ahmed notes.
Now, Turkey’s armed operation is reaching a peak, with Turkish forces taking de facto control up to 15km deep within sovereign Iraqi territory. “Through egregious violations of international law, Turkish forces are establishing checkpoints and patrols on Iraqi sovereign territory in the guise of hunting down the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters whom they accuse of terrorism,” Ahmed explains.
Baghdad has repeatedly warned Turkey against its incursions into sovereign territory, but the new operation has rather taken on the tenor of a permanent occupation like that which Turkey has established throughout swathes of northern Syria. “Let me be clear,” Ahmed writes: “Iraq is not Syria.” She notes that “there are established government entities” in both Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdish capital Erbil (Hewlêr), which should not tolerate the occupation.
But both Iraqi Kurdistan’s dominant Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and federal Iraqi authorities have met with top Turkish security officials, cooking up a seemingly joint plan to “permanently resolve” the situation in the region in Turkey’s favour by creating a new road linking Turkish military bases with development and infrastructure projects as part of the so-called Development Road project.
“Tens of thousands of lives have been lost and sacrificed for every inch of this land during decades of incessant conflict,” Ahmed warns over the occupation of Iraqi Kurdish territory. “I fear for the legitimacy of the federal and regional [Kurdish] governments because of their inaction at best, and their complicity at worst, because both are silent and have failed to address the ongoing attacks and violations of our sovereignty.”
By convention, Iraq’s President is chosen from the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. Ahmed is married to Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) member Abdul Latif Rashid, the incumbent President, and is carving out an unprecedented role as a stateswoman in her own right.
