Turkey has continued to escalate its unprecedented military operation in Iraqi Kurdistan, displacing the residents of over a hundred Kurdish villages and establishing checkpoints deep in sovereign Iraqi Kurdish territory. Though Turkey claims its operations are justified by its security concerns over the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), analysts and Kurdish political representatives argue the operation is in fact intended to create a de facto occupation, furthering Turkey’s regional political, territorial and economic aspirations.
Zagros Hiwa is a spokesperson for the umbrella political organisation Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK). In this interview, exclusively published in full by Medya News and lightly edited for clarity, Hiwa explores the complex historic, economic and ideological basis for Turkey’s military operations against the Kurds.
Turkey says it is conducting an anti-PKK operation to protect its national security. What is your response to this argument?
There are great problems in Turkey’s notion of national security. For Turkey, national security is the security of Sunni Turks. So people of other religious and ethnic identities who live either within Turkey or in neighbouring countries are regarded as a threat to the so-called national security of Turkey. So each operation to protect this national security has come at the cost of ethnically cleansing a particular ethnic or religious group. This is what has happened to the Armenians, Circassians, Yazidis, Alevis, Syriacs, Greeks and many other ethnic and religious entities. In one way, we can say that Turkey’s national security has been built on the graves of Kurds, Armenians, Yazidis, Syriacs and many other peoples. Turkey’s main policy against all these peoples is a policy of physical, cultural and political genocide. That is, anybody who [is not Sunni Turkish and] lives in or around Turkey is supposed to deny their own identity and adopt a Sunni Turkish identity, otherwise a fate like the Armenian genocide, the Dersim massacre or the Zilan massacre will await them. Today, national security is an argument used by Turkey to camouflage its genocidal campaign against the Kurds.
What are the motivations Turkey is seeking to obscure?
Turkey’s true motivation is to subject the Kurds to cultural and political genocide, deny them all their natural rights and demographically change their homeland so that [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions of implementing the ‘Misak-i Milli’ or ‘National Pact’ can come true. According to this pact [an expansionist declaration of intent published in 1920 by the Ottoman authorities] Turkey lays claim to large swathes of land in Iraq and Syria, namely the Aleppo and Mosul governorates. To achieve this, Turkey has either intervened directly or used proxy groups. Since 2011, Turkey has used proxy groups including al-Qaida, al-Nusra Front, ISIS, [al-Qaeda offshoot] Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham, the [Turkish-controlled] Syrian National Army, [Turkmen militia] Sultan Murat, etc, to ethnically cleanse these areas of their Kurdish population and replace them with Turkmen and jihadist Arab proxies.
Attacks, via ISIS, on Ayn al-Arab (Kobanê), Sinjar (Şengal), Mosul and many other Kurdish-inhabited areas in Iraq and Syria, are milestones in Turkey’s National Pact policy. When the resistance of the Kurds, supported by the International Coalition to Defeat ISIS, managed to defeat ISIS, Turkey decided to intervene directly and materialise its Neo-Ottoman ambitions. So it started to attack, and is still attacking those places which were pivotal in managing and waging the fight against ISIS. It attacked Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and invaded cities like Afrin (Efrîn), Ras al-Ayn (Serê Kaniyê) and Tell Abyad (Girê Spî). It still attacks Ayn al-Arab (Kobanê) and has already destroyed all the infrastructure essential for the life of those peoples who live in Rojava and northeast Syria.
What does this policy look like on the ground in Iraqi Kurdistan?
Turkey has staged a large-scale military operation to invade and consequently annex to Turkey large swathes of land in northern Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan). Turkey knows that the boots on the ground which played an essential role in defeating ISIS were ideologically inspired by Kurdish leader [Abdullah Öcalan] and militarily supported by the Kurdistan freedom movement’s guerrillas in [the PKK-held] Medya Defence Zones [in the mountains of northern Iraq]. That’s why it has imposed an aggravated regime of solitary confinement and incommunicado detention on [Öcalan] and launched an all-out invasion against the Medya Defence Zones. In one way, Turkey is trying to avenge ISIS’s defeat. Turkey attacks those places which have been and still are the hubs of resistance against ISIS, and does all this under the cover of NATO.
Turkey has been fighting the PKK for 40 years. What is different about the current operation?
During all the 101 years of Turkey’s genocidal attacks against the Kurds, this state has tried to ensure the support of the countries which are party to the [post-World War I] Treaty of Lausanne. It has either lured them or blackmailed them into giving such support, or to ensure their silence against the genocidal campaigns. The emergence of the PKK was nothing but a response and a resolve to stop this cultural, physical and political genocide against the Kurds. When the 1980 coup and the inhuman tortures and killings of [Kurdish activists and militants] in the notorious Diyarbakir prison [in Turkey] left no room whatsoever for democratic politics, the PKK embarked on a struggle of legitimate self-defence.
Since then, Turkey has sought the support of the countries that have been party to the Treaty of Lausanne and those which later inherited its legacy. Particularly, Turkey has abused Article 5 of the NATO Agreement, claiming that it is under threat, and asking NATO member countries to give it political, military and technical support. Unfortunately, these countries have provided Turkey with such support, at the cost of the very existence of the Kurdish people. New dimensions have been added to this support in the latest operations.
Despite the fact that our struggle has many times brought Turkey to the point of change from fascism and authoritarianism towards democratisation, these states have politically (both domestically and internationally), economically and financially supported Erdoğan to ensure his stay in power. They have turned a blind eye to all those crimes that Erdoğan has committed against humanity in Turkey, in Middle Eastern countries, in the Caucuses and in North Africa. Erdoğan openly supports jihadist groups and uses them as proxies to invade northern Syria and northern Iraq.
What are the domestic and regional consequences of this approach by the international powers?
NATO member countries have not only failed to directly oppose these policies, but have also supported them indirectly with different justifications and on different pretexts. This has made them accomplices to the crimes Erdoğan has committed. Erdoğan is openly trampling national and international law by imposing a regime of solitary confinement on [Öcalan] on the prison island of İmralı, but these NATO member countries and European countries don’t raise any objections against Erdoğan.
Erdoğan’s Turkey is the largest prison for journalists and political dissidents, there are gross violations of human rights, particularly women’s rights and liberties, and yet there is no serious stance against Turkey. The NATO member countries have financially helped Erdoğan prop up Turkey’s flailing economy and consequently win the rigged elections. Turkey has openly prevented the Kurds from being politically represented in local and national elections, imprisoned thousands of Kurdish political activists and removed nearly 80 democratically-elected mayors in Kurdish-populated cities, but is still regarded a precious NATO ally.
How has Turkey’s pursuit of rapprochement with its regional neighbours affected the conflict?
Despite all this political and economic support of Turkey’s war on the Kurds from NATO member countries, Turkey has failed to gain its desired results. That’s why Erdoğan has begun rapprochements with the neighbouring countries of Iraq, Syria and Iran. Erdoğan’s visit to Baghdad on 22 April 2024 was an attempt to get Iraq to a point where it would fight the PKK directly. The same holds true with Syria and Bashar al-Assad. In 2011, Erdoğan changed the ‘Brother Assad’ rhetoric to ‘Murderer Assad’ so that he could openly intervene in Syria, topple Assad and replace him with a Muslim Brotherhood government like that of Egypt. After 13 years, this policy has yielded nothing but failure. Now Erdoğan is seeking a rapprochement with ‘Murderer Assad’ once again, and is calling him ‘Mr Assad’, solely in order to be able to incorporate him in the genocidal war against the Kurds. Turkey is making great concessions to Iran in order to ensure Iran’s help in getting Iraq and Syria to change their stance against the Kurds and the PKK. By using [the Iraqi Kurdish] Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) as Turkey’s Trojan horse in Middle Eastern and Kurdistan politics, Erdoğan has been able to bring Iraq to the point of banning the PKK and turning a blind eye to the military invasion in northern Iraq.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Turkey used to stage military operations in northern Iraq and withdraw after a certain period. But recent military operations are defined by invasion and annexation. Large swathes of land, bigger than Lebanon, have been invaded, and Turkey has built nearly 100 heavily fortified military bases there. More than 600 villages have been evacuated and razed to the ground and thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes, to the point of no return. What is happening now in northern Iraq resembles what Saddam did to the region at the time of the notorious Anfal campaign.
Is Turkey’s newfound technological capability making a difference to the war?
Turkey has been provided with military support and state-of-the-art technology in its genocidal attacks against the Kurds. Many NATO member countries, particularly Canada, Germany, Britain and the US, have provided Turkey with the expertise and technology to develop armed drones and precision weapons. Had it not been for the help of NATO member countries, Turkey would not have been able to develop drone technology. These drones have been used by Turkey to commit a lot of war crimes in Kurdistan, resulting in the death of hundreds of civilians all across South Kurdistan [the Kurdistan Region of Iraq], from Zakho (Zaxo) to Sinjar, Kirkuk (Kerkûk) and Kalar (Kelar).
Turkey’s ‘Development Road’ project aims to construct a Turkish-controlled trade route from the Middle East to Europe, as an alternative to the recently-proposed IMEC [India – Middle East – Europe Economic Corridor] route. How is the invasion linked to this project and Turkey’s broader geopolitical aspirations?
For thousands of years the economy of the peoples living in Iraq has depended on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Major civilisations have developed on the banks of these rivers. In recent years, Turkey has built dozens of dams on these two rivers and has weaponised water against the peoples of Iraq and Syria. Had Turkey had any intention of helping the development of Iraq, it would not have cut the flow of the Tigris and the Euphrates. By cutting the water of the Euphrates and the Tigris and pushing its ‘Development Road’ project, Turkey wants to deprive Iraq of the ability to use its own resources, to develop its own economy. Turkey wants to loot Iraq’s resources and turn the country into a market for Turkish goods, to further interfere and intervene in Iraq’s internal politics and annex it to [bolster] Turkey’s anti-Kurdish politics. In one way, this operation is clearing the way for the pillage and looting it calls the ‘Development Road’. Turkey has long depended on its geostrategic position as a link between Asia, Russia, Africa and Europe in order to advance its interests and get other countries to turn a blind eye to its aggressions. With the 2023 agreement on the IMEC corridor, Turkey thinks that it has lost its geostrategic position and been excluded from international equations. The IMEC corridor directly connects Asia to Europe without depending on Turkey. So by trying to build its ‘Development Road’, Turkey wants to build an alternative to IMEC. The recent invasion and annexation of northern Iraq is a step towards getting full control of most of the areas around this road, presenting it as a secure alternative road to IMEC.
