AP is reporting some kind of troop movement or build-up on Turkey's border with the Kurdish region of Iraq. It's hard to say exactly what's happening here, and why. Is the Turkish military trying to take a swipe at Kurdish militants while civilian leaders are preoccupied with the constitutional crisis? Are we seeing the latest in a series of saber-rattling exercises between the Turks and Kurds? Is it exactly what the Turkish military claims it is, a hot pursuit of PKK fighters?
Whatever is going on, it's a prime illustration of how a small, militant faction can mess up the lives of fairly reasonable people. The Turkish government has a legitimate concern about the PKK, who has been raiding Turkish communities and slipping across the border into Iraq for several years. Kurdish leaders who don't belong to the PKK, and in many cases are their mortal political enemies, don't have the means to stop the PKK. The United States is too focused on the Iraqi insurgency to give the PKK any significant attention; the American military certainly lacks the manpower to patrol the Turkish-Iraqi border more thoroughly.
This conundrum existed before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but that event made things worse. The Kurds had a functioning, albeit officially unrecognized, government in the NATO-patrolled section of Northern Iraq. They had been dealing with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi while he still headed Ansar al-Islam, a group that regularly tried to assassinate Kurdish leaders. The focus of the Kurdish mini-state was on protecting itself from the Ba'athist regime, not trying to protect its interests in the sprawling political melee that is Iraq today. The NATO presence was hardly sufficient to police the borders, but if the conflict between Kurds and Turks escalated, more troops might have been brought into the region.
Now, more Americans are in Iraq, but their attention is elsewhere. It's hard to imagine NATO countries sending more troops to northern Iraq to deal just with the Turkish-Kurdish issues, since they'll likely be sucked into the larger Iraqi conflict as a result. The burden now falls almost completely on the negotiators, who have few cards to play with both sides. Godspeed to anyone trying to deal with this simmering conflict.
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