Türkiye will soon end its last operation in northern Iraq, says Erdogan | Recep Tayyip Erdogan News

Ankara has carried out repeated ground operations against Kurdish fighters, launching the most recent in 2022.

Turkey will soon end its latest ground military operation in northern Iraq, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

Speaking to military academy graduates on Saturday, Erdogan hailed Operation Claw-Lock, launched by Ankara in April 2022, as a success. He said Kurdish fighters are now “unable to act within our borders.”

“We will close the lock very soon in the Operation Claw Zone in northern Iraq,” Erdogan said, according to the Reuters news agency.

The Turkish leader did not give a 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 increased airstrikes in recent months.

Turkish forces have been fighting sporadically against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), based in northern Iraq, for decades. The PKK, which Ankara, the US and the EU consider a “terrorist” group, first took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984.

Turkey began launching large-scale ground operations in northern Iraq against the PKK in the mid-1990s. It began incursions into Syria in 2015. These operations targeted both Kurdish fighters and the armed group ISIL (ISIS).

More than 40,000 people were killed during the decades of fighting, with Turkish bombings in July 2022 killing eight tourists, including a child, at a resort in the Kurdish district of Zakho in northern Iraq.

In Syria, Turkish forces have targeted the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG), which they consider a wing of the PKK, as well as the Kurdish-led and US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces.

‘Totally 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 take control of Syria’s northern border areas following the abrupt withdrawal of US troops.

Speaking to Politico earlier this month, Turkish Defense Minister Yasar Guler said Ankara is “fully determined to create an area of ​​30-40 km [19 – 25-mile] deep security corridor along our borders with Iraq and Syria and to completely cleanse the region of terrorists.”

“We will continue operations until the last terrorist is neutralized,” he said at the time.

Speaking on Saturday, Erdogan promised that Turkish forces will “complete the missing points in the security belt along our southern border with Syria”, the AFP news agency reported.