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What are the Turks doing in northern Iraq?
There is no credible Iraqi force that can move into Mosul, kick out ISIS, and occupy the city, and there probably won’t be for a long time. But the siege of Mosul has begun. Clearly, Turkey, which has boxed itself out of a solution in Syria, wants to be a part of whatever happens in northern Iraq. The Turkish troops that rolled across the border last week took up positions in the town of Bashiqa, a few miles outside of Mosul. The public reason given by the Turks is that the troops were sent to bolster a contingent of forces that was already there to train a Sunni militia. But no one really believes that.The Iraqi government may not have invited the Turks, but it seems pretty clear that the Kurdish Regional Government, which oversees the autonomous region of northern Iraq, did not protest when they arrived. In any case, the Iraqi Kurds can’t say no to the Turks: the thing that all Kurdish hopes of independence rest on is the oil pipeline that sends Kurdish oil to the Mediterranean every day. It runs through Turkey, and Erdoğan could turn it off at any moment if he wanted to. On Wednesday, the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, whom I Profiled in the magazine last year, met with Erdoğan in Ankara. So, finally, why did the Turks go into northern Iraq? It seems pretty clear that Erdoğan, whose policy has failed in Syria, is trying to be relevant again. “Erdoğan wants to be part of whatever happens in Mosul, and putting troops there guarantees that,’’ a senior Iraqi official told me. Is it going to work? Maybe. But the danger, increasingly, is that with so many major countries jockeying for power in Syria and Iraq events will spin out of control. The Russian cruise missiles flying over northern Iraq are just one example. Several have already crashed in northwestern Iran; just wait until that happens in Iraq. Turkish troops in Iraq; Russians, Iranians, and Hezbollah fighters in Syria: the Middle East is a very busy place. The longer the war goes on in Syria, the greater the risk that it turns into something much worse. Posted by: Pappy 2015-12-11 |
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