Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From MESH Admin

On Thursday evening, Turkish forces entered northern Iraq to do battle with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari has called the move “a limited military incursion into a remote, isolated and uninhabited region.” According to various sources, there have been clashes in the Qandil mountains along the Iraqi-Iranian border and in the Zap region. Turkish aircraft reportedly also bombed targets around Al-Amadiyah, an Iraqi Kurdish mountain town about 10 kilometers south of the Turkish border.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has made available three maps showing the location of PKK enclaves in northern Iraq. (Click on each thumbnail to see the full map.)

The first one has been prepared by Abdulkadir Onay, a lieutenant colonel in the Turkish Army and a visiting military fellow at The Washington Institute. It divides the PKK presence in northern Iraq into eight regions, delineates them, and numbers the camps and “the approximate number of terrorists” in each region. It also shows which parts of northern Iraq are accessible only with PKK authorization

The other two maps, from last year, show the same area in a satellite view that gives a sense of the topography, and marks PKK bases. One map shows the western sector, the other shows the eastern sector.

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