Turkiye’s foreign minister seeks Iraq’s support against Kurdish militant group

Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was in Baghdad for high-level meetings on Thursday, ahead of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s expected visit next month and a potential Turkish offensive against a Kurdish militant group that maintains bases in Iraq.

The talks between the Turkish foreign minister and his Iraqi counterpart Fuad Hussein would focus on “counter-terrorism, security and military cooperation,” according to a statement carried by the state-run Iraqi News Agency.

Fidan was accompanied by Turkish Defense Minister Yasar Guler and Ibrahim Kalin, the director of Turkiye’s National Intelligence Organization.

Turkiye has been seeking greater cooperation from Baghdad in its fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Kurdish separatist group that has waged an insurgency against Turkiye since the 1980s and is banned there.

The PKK is not officially outlawed in Iraq and has a foothold in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, where the central Iraqi government does not have much influence.

Erdogan is expected to visit Iraq in April, after Turkish local elections on March 31.

The Turkish president has said that his country is determined to end PKK’s presence in Iraq this summer.

Turkiye often launches strikes against targets in Syria and Iraq that it believes to be affiliated with the PKK, which Baghdad has complained is a breach of its sovereignty.

Those strikes have escalated in recent months, after PKK attacks on Turkish military bases in northern Iraq in December and January left 21 soldiers dead.

Local Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria have said that many of the Turkish strikes targeted civilian infrastructure, cutting off electricity and water supplies in wide areas held by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

Qassim Al-Araji, the adviser for national security affairs to Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani, said in a televised interview this week that Iraqi authorities would like to take a similar approach to the PKK as they did to Iranian Kurdish dissident groups based in northern Iraq.

The presence of the Iranian dissidents had become a point of tension with Tehran and last summer, Iran and Iraq reached an agreement to disarm the dissident groups and relocate their members from military bases to displacement camps.