Ankara has carried out repeated ground operations against Kurdish fighters, launching the most recent one in 2022.
Türkiye will soon end its latest ground military operation in northern Iraq, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
On Saturday, in a speech to military academy graduates, Erdogan hailed Operation Claw-Lock, which Ankara launched in April 2022, as a success. He said Kurdish fighters are now “incapable of acting within our borders.”
“We will close the airlock very soon in the Claw Operation Zone in northern Iraq,” Erdogan said, according to the Reuters news agency.
The Turkish leader gave no timetable for the end of the operation and it was not immediately clear what it would mean for the situation on the ground in northern Iraq and Syria, where Ankara has stepped up airstrikes in recent months.
Turkish forces have been sporadically fighting the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), based in northern Iraq, for decades. The PKK, which Ankara, the United States and the European Union consider a “terrorist” group, first took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984.
Turkey began launching large-scale ground operations against the PKK in northern Iraq in the mid-1990s. It began incursions into Syria in 2015. Those operations targeted both Kurdish fighters and the armed group ISIS (Daesh).
More than 40,000 people have been killed during the decades of fighting; in July 2022, a Turkish airstrike killed eight tourists, including a child, at a resort in the Kurdish district of Zakho in northern Iraq.
In Syria, Turkish forces have attacked the Kurdish People's Defense Units (YPG), which they consider a wing of the PKK, as well as the Kurdish-led, US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces.
'Fully determined' to build buffer zone
In recent years, Ankara has repeatedly sought to build a buffer or “safe” zone along its border with its southern neighbors, launching an operation in 2019 to seize control of Syria’s northern border areas following the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops there.
Speaking to Politico earlier this month, Turkish Defense Minister Yasar Guler said Ankara is “fully determined to create a 30-40 km bridge.” [19 – 25-mile] “to create a deep security corridor along our Iraqi and Syrian borders and completely clear the region of terrorists.”
“We will continue operations until the last terrorist is neutralized,” he said then.
On Saturday, Erdogan promised that Turkish forces would “complete the missing points of the security belt along our southern border with Syria,” the AFP news agency reported.
