Barzani sees PKK threatening Kurdish unity
Those who were thought that there would be a grand Kurdish state on our southern borders must now be having second thoughts as the Iraqi Kurds are now saying loudly that they do not want the PKK in their territory anymore. The PKK and Masoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) have been at odds for […]Ilnur Cevik writes for the Daily Sabah:
Those who were thought that there would be a grand Kurdish state on our southern borders must now be having second thoughts as the Iraqi Kurds are now saying loudly that they do not want the PKK in their territory anymore. The PKK and Masoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) have been at odds for decades since the day the PKK moved its militants into northern Iraq's Qandil Mountains exploiting the volatile situation created first by the Iran-Iraq war and then by the First Gulf War.
When the PKK moved into northern Iraq it attacked and destroyed several Kurdish villages especially in the areas controlled by the KDP. That has set a blood feud that has never been solved. Then in the 1990s, Turkish army units and the KDP peshmerga fighters launched about two dozen attacks on the PKK bases in the Qandil Mountains but failed to dislodge the militants. In the process, 3,000 Peshmerga soldiers lost their lives and since then Masoud Barzani has been saying that such military operations are useless and the PKK issue should be resolved with dialogue between Turkey and the PKK.
