Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is raising the Iraqi government’s hopes in resolving the water crisis plus other economic and security issues. However, he is negotiating them in exchange for Iraq’s sovereignty. This deal trades water for the PKK.

For the first time in 40 years, Baghdad appears very close to engaging in a war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK. The PKK is a party which is in opposition to the Turkish leadership, and is active in northern Iraq.  

In return for their support, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish President, will provide the Iraqi government with hopes of achieving gains in resolving the water crisis plus other economic and security issues.  

According to unofficial statistics, Turkey deploys about 7,000 soldiers, including officers, who penetrate deep into Iraqi territory, up to 100 km (over 62 miles), with 11 military bases and 19 camps in the country. 

 The beginning of the story  

The PKK began as a Marxist political formation. This later changed as it worked and allied with forces from an Islamic background, such as the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), who are affiliated with the Shia faith.  

The founding of the PKK party dates to 1978, when it was formed under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan – who would later be arrested. Its goal was to establish an independent Kurdish state in Southeastern Turkey.  

The party engaged in military action in the early days of its foundation, and its number of fighters reached 10,000 in the 1990s. The PKK’s enthusiasm for establishing a Kurdish state in Southeastern Turkey has since evolved and their focus is now on establishing autonomy for the Kurds in Turkey. 

After more than 30 years of its fight to achieve its political goals, over 40,000 people have been killed because of the party’s operations, including women and children.  

Some parties close to the PKK justify its armed activities by citing campaigns against the group carried out by the Turkish government in the 1980s, which also prompted it’s to move to Iraqi Kurdistan region.  

Saddam Hussein’s regime, at the time waging a war against Iran, did not welcome the presence of the PKK in the north of its territory. It bartered with Turkey to allow it to pursue PKK members at a maximum distance of 5 kilometers (about 3 miles) inside Iraqi territory.  

Öcalan, the head of the party, moved clandestinely between Iraq and Syria, before he was kidnapped and imprisoned in Turkey on charges of treason. He remains there to this day.  

In the early 1990s, a major change occurred in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. Baghdad lost control over the north of the country, and the PKK expanded significantly at that time.   

In return, the Turkish army, in accordance with its previous agreement with Saddam Hussein, continued to launch operations against the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan, who had begun to receive international protection.  

Following Öcalan’s arrest, the PKK appeared confused. The brother of the party’s founder, Othman Öcalan, said, “After Öcalan’s arrest, efforts were undertaken to reorganise the party’s ranks. But the morale of some of its leaders collapsed.”  

This was until 2003.  When the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, members of the PKK began leaving their mountain isolation and participating in the management of cities in the Kurdistan region.  

PKK dominance expanded despite the pledges of both former US presidents George Bush (2001-2009) and Barack Obama (2009-2017) to crack down on them, due to the alleged threat that they posed to the region. Turkish military operations inside Iraqi territory continued.  

With the emergence of ISIS and its control over large cities in Syria and Iraq in 2014, the PKK witnessed yet another transformation.  

The PKK in Sinjar  

A former official in Sinjar, which is inhabited by a Yazidi majority in northern Mosul and is one of the most important strongholds of the PKK in Iraq, said that the PKK “fought against ISIS in northern Iraq, and this made them popular among the Yazidis in particular.”  

The rise of the PKK occurred at the same moment that Turkey’s dissatisfaction with Washington’s measures to limit the influence of the Kurdish movement began to increase. Turkey’s doubts increased further during the war against ISIS and the involvement of the “People’s Protection Units”, a Yazidi group in northern Iraq linked to the PKK. 

This, perhaps, is what then prompted Turkey to establish a military camp in Zelkan in northern Mosul, which was exposed in a scandal in Iraq in 2015, after the then Iraqi government tried to conceal the matter.  
 

According to a former representative of Nineveh, Haider al-Abadi, the former Prime Minister of Iraq (2014-2018), was not aware of the existence of the Turkish camp. In 2015, he sent his Minister of Defence, Khaled al-Obeidi, to visit Sinjar on the occasion of its liberation in November 2015, after information was revealed about the presence of a large group of Turkish forces, near the Bashiqa district, 12 km (about 7 miles) northeast of Mosul. They were there under the pretext of “training volunteers.”  

According to Abdul Rahman Al-Luwaizi’s (former PM) statements in 2015, “After a few days, news of Turkish reinforcements was confirmed, and the number of forces reached 1000 in the same camp (Zelkan).”  

In turn, the government attempted to deal with Turkish presence through diplomatic means.  

Haider al-Abadi, the former Prime Minister, agreed with then-US Vice President Joe Biden (currently the US president), in a phone call, to halt the presence of foreign forces in Iraq without coordination with the Iraqi government.  

At that time, the White House published a statement in which Biden called on Turkey to withdraw any forces from Iraq “unless they are allowed to be there with Baghdad’s permission.”  

News leaked that Ankara had withdrawn its forces from Zelkan camp in Bashiqa, north of Mosul, although former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu claimed that his country’s forces had redeployed to Iraq and had not withdrawn completely.   

Climbing Mount Qandil  

In Sinjar, a former city official told Jummar: “After the fall of Saddam’s regime, the PKK had an official party called the Free Yazidi Democratic Movement.”  

According to websites close to the PKK, on 4 August 2014, the latter formed the “Shingal (Sinjar) Resistance Units” to defend the city and liberate it from ISIS.  

The former official, who requested that his name not be published, stated that the PKK descended from the Qandil Mountains in 2014 to support the Yazidis after the occupation of ISIS. 

During its occupation of Sinjar in August 2014, ISIS killed approximately 1,300 Yazidis, and caused the displacement of 360,000 others, according to the General Directorate of Yazidi Affairs in the Ministry of Endowments of the Kurdistan Regional Government.  

The Qandil Mountains are in the Kurdistan region at the meeting point of the Iraq-Iran-Turkish borders and extend about 30 kilometers (about 20 miles) into Turkish territory about 150 kilometers (about 90 miles) from Erbil.  

Mount Qandil is linked to the military activity of the PKK. Most of their camps and training centres are located there, even though they are outside of Turkish territory. Therefore, it has always been a target of Turkish fighter jets, although that has failed to limit the party’s military activity, according to the former Sinjar official.  

“The PKK set up infrastructure for its fighters in these rugged mountains.” Although there is no accurate count of the number of PKK fighters in the mountains, estimates indicate that their number does not exceed 4,000, according to the former official.  

The official also confirmed that the PKK is not wholly comprised of Iraqis. It includes multiple nationalities, “Turkish, European, Syrian, Russian, in addition to Iraqi.”  

The Sinjar equation   

In March 2017, Turkish threats to storm Sinjar in order to track down the PKK increased. This forced the party to announce its withdrawal from the city. “Sinjar Resistance Units” (Yabsha) took over its headquarters.  

The former official in Sinjar said, “Sinjar Resistance Units” is a formation linked to the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and receives salaries and weapons from them.” The former official estimated the number of the Yabsha at about 1,500 members.  

In 2018, the head of the local council in Sinjar, Yassi Naif, revealed that armed elements had taken control of the local council building.  

Naif considered at the time that the presence of these armed Yabsha members made “300,000 (displaced) people from the region reluctant to return.”   

The former official in Sinjar also said, “In late 2018, the PKK came under the cover of the Yabsha to control the local government.”  

He added that this group “chose a mayor (Qaem maqam) in Sinjar and a district director, then formed a judicial council and expelled the old administration to Dohuk.” A new mayor was appointed in 2023 by the former governor of Nineveh, Najm Abdullah al-Jubouri, who runs the city from outside Sinjar at Fayda area, south of Dohuk.  

At that time, the tense situation between Kurdistan and Baghdad helped the expansion of the PKK, when forces affiliated with the federal government entered Sinjar during the events of 16 October 2017, and in return, the forces affiliated with the Kurdistan Regional Government withdrew.  

The PKK or its shadow, the Yashba, remained in control of Sinjar, until Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, the former Prime Minister, came in 2020 and concluded what was known as the “Sinjar Agreement” to manage the city.  

Ahmed Mulla Talal, spokesman for former Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Kadhimi, said that the Commander-in-Chief supervised an “historic agreement that strengthens the authority of the federal government in Sinjar in accordance with the constitution, at the administrative and security levels, and ends the influence of foreign groups.”  

He noted, in a tweet, that the agreement “paves the way for the reconstruction of the city and the complete return of its afflicted people, in coordination with the Kurdistan Regional Government.”   

This agreement was not implemented, according to Sinjar’s former official, which included three focus areas: security, services, and normalization by returning the displaced.  

The number of displaced people from Sinjar is estimated at about 200,000, according to the United Nations.   

The city now appears to be governed by the PKK and Iran, according to Ghazi Faisal, a former diplomat and the head of the Iraqi Center for Strategic Studies, who spoke to Jummar.  

Faisal pointed out that “Tehran supports the PKK in Sinjar because this city is an important node on the route to transport weapons and fighters between Iran, Syria and Lebanon.” 

According to Qais Al-Khazali, the leader of the political party Asaib Ahl al-Haq and a leader in the Shi’a party alliance known as “The Coordination Framework,” the Sinjar Agreement occurred in the Al-Kadhimi government and was legally proven to be “inapplicable.”  

Is this the end?  

According to official Turkish media, Turkey will now put a stop to the PKK in its largest campaign in the summer of 2024, and will create a buffer zone of up to 40 km (of 25 miles) inside Iraqi territory.   

Conversely, Baghdad appears to approve the Turkish plan. The Iraqi government described the PKK as a “terrorist organisation” for the first time during a visit by Turkish officials to Baghdad in March 2024, according to the official Iraqi news agency.  

Baghdad had previously avoided labeling the PKK with this designation despite demands by Erdogan to Al-Sudani during his visit to Ankara in March 2023.   

At that time, in a joint press conference with the Turkish President, Al-Sudani contented himself with saying of the armed groups in the north of the country, “Iraq is committed not to allow its lands to be used as a launching pad for attacks on Turkey.”  

Ghazi Faisal said, “Iraq is looking forward to solutions to the water crisis and making the most of the Development Road launched by Turkey, in addition to purchasing weapons from them.”  

Iraq gave these key points to Turkey in negotiations between the two countries which lasted for more than 8 months and were concluded with the signing of 22 framework agreements, 22 memorandums of understanding, and a framework memorandum of understanding related to water, during Erdogan’s visit to Baghdad.  

Turkey sees itself having great strategic interests in Iraq, including a project to pass gas from Qatar through Iraqi territory towards Turkey and Europe, and the establishment of a second oil pipeline parallel to the pipeline extending from Kirkuk to the port of Ceyhan. It also has the Development Road project. 

Faisal believes that trade and economic relations, especially the Development Road, “will not be achieved if there is a threat from the PKK in northern Iraq, which is something the Turkish president has warned about.”  

The “Strategic Framework Agreement” for cooperation in security, energy, and economy that Iraq signed with Turkey “is a roadmap for building sustainable cooperation” between the two countries, says Prime Minister Muhammad Shia’ Al-Sudani. 

On the Iraqi side, the water issue is the most important one for negotiation with Turkey. A leak from the memorandum of the framework agreement has kept the discussion about fair sharing of water open. The framework agreement does not specify fixed proportions and quantities that Iraqi lands will receive. Only a third of their share is reached now.  

What did emerge from the agreement demonstrates Turkish dominance over the issue of water management and agriculture in Iraq. According to the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Baghdad and Ankara will cooperate “through joint projects to improve water management.” Turkish companies will be invited to cooperate in infrastructure for irrigation projects such as water harvesting systems and dams, canals insulation, filtration and desalination plants installation, and water treatment projects.  

Adel Al-Mukhtar, an expert in the field of water, said, “Going to international arbitration is better for Iraq in the case of the water crisis with Turkey…The agreements may contain mistakes.”  

In the words of an advisor to one of the parties within “The Coordination Framework,” the Iraq-Turkey agreement is “part of the water deal in exchange for the PKK” led by the Sudani government.  

This “deal” will keep Turkish army bases scattered throughout the mountains and valleys of the Kurdish region, and “these (Turkish) forces will remain based on an agreement between the two parties, and work within efforts to combat extremist groups.”