Remember how the US was losing the war everywhere but in the Kurdish North, which was a beacon of stability? Well, there is a huge crisis looming there now.

Short version: The PKK, a rebel group which is fighting for the independence of Kurds in Turkey has been staging a series of raids in Southeastern Turkey, and then hiding in Kurdish Iraq. It is debatable how much the Iraqi Kurds are sheltering these PKK fighters. They have gone as far as to capture eight Turkish soldiers.

Turkey, a NATO member, is facing intense domestic pressure to send their military across the Iraqi border and root out the PKK fighters. The Iraqi goverment has repeatedly not consented to such raids, except on a case-by-case basis. If Turkey does this, the Iraq war goes from being an awful mess for Americans and Iraqis to being a regional clusterfuck.

Oh, and once again, this is something that people were worrying about before the war, and which Bush had no plan to prevent. 

posted by Valatan in Politics at 11:35AM CST on Oct 22 [trackback] (2 comments total)