After the death of 13 Turks who were hostages of the PKK (Workers' Party of Kurdistan) in Iraq, Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday February 15 accused the United States of supporting "Kurdish terrorists" ...

Why Turkey accuses the United States of supporting “Kurdish terrorists”?

The PKK is accused by Turkey of having killed 13 Turkish hostages.

AFP / PHOTO / AHMAD AL-RUBAYE

Text by: Murielle Paradon Follow

6 min

After the death of 13 Turks who were hostages of the PKK (Workers' Party of Kurdistan) in Iraq, Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday February 15th accused the United States of supporting “Kurdish terrorists”.

The American ambassador to Ankara was even summoned.

The United States made a point by denouncing the responsibility of the “terrorists of the PKK”.

The analysis of Yohanan Benhaim, specialist in Turkish foreign policy, co-founder of the Noria research center.

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RFI: Why such tension between Turkey and the United States?

Since 2014, the United States has found in the Kurdish groups in Syria - the YPG, close to the PKK - effective military allies in the fight against the Islamic State.

This is why after the fall of Kobane, the United States, and certain other European countries for that matter, supported militarily, logistically, sometimes politically, these Kurdish allies in Syria as part of the fight against Islamic State.

This Western policy, and in particular American, was extremely badly lived by Ankara who accuse the Western powers of supporting groups which are linked to the PKK with which the Turkish state has been at war since 1984. Moreover, the United States welcomes also Fethullah Gülen, accused by the Turkish government of being behind the

attempted coup of July 2016

What must be understood is that Joe Biden's team is made up mainly of members of the former team of Barack Obama who built this policy of rapprochement with groups close to the PKK in Syria.

And this is why Turkey, now aware of this change of team which is not favorable to it, is taking this opportunity to put pressure on its American partner so that he distances himself from them. vis the PKK and its Syrian allies.

It should also be added that this desire to push the Americans to break off contact with the PKK and its allies in Syria and Iraq also aims to promote the acceptance by the United States and the actors of the region of an operation. that Turkey wishes to lead to Sinjar, one of the remaining strongholds of the PKK in Iraq, on the border between Iraq and Syria.

And while Turkey has wanted for several months now to conduct this operation in Sinjar, it is possible that these assassinations offer it the opportunity it was waiting for to set up this operation.

What do we know about the deaths of these 13 Turks at the hands of the PKK?

In what context did it take place?

It is extremely difficult to draw definitive conclusions at this stage: the Turkish state accuses the PKK of having murdered them;

the latter affirms on the contrary that they died in a bombardment of the Turkish air force.

It would seem that these hostages, most obviously Turkish police and military personnel, have been held by the PKK for several years now, and that their death comes in a context where the Turkish army is said to have carried out an operation to save them.

This type of execution of hostages is extremely rare: the PKK generally frees its hostages after a process of discussion and negotiations with the Turkish authorities, often in the context of prisoner exchanges.

We must also remember the context in which these deaths take place.

The Turkish state and the PKK have been engaged in the war since 2015 after a failure of the discussion process that had been taking place for several years.

In Turkey, there has been an extremely destructive war, especially in the predominantly Kurdish regions of the country.

In Syria, very large-scale military operations were carried out with an occupation of the territory along the border strip, by the Turkish forces and its allies, in particular against the Kurdish forces in Syria.

And in Iraq, for more than a year and a half, we have observed a very significant intensification of fighting and Turkish operations, with the massive use of drones and with the support of the Iraqi PDK, an Iraqi Kurdish party.

We can also add that this war against the PKK and the recent tragedy which befell these Turkish hostages represent an opportunity to further criminalize the legal Kurdish party of Turkey, the HDP.

Today

we have seen

hundreds of arrests

against this legal party and its supporters.

Why does Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan adopt such a bellicose stance against the PKK but also on other grounds

Since 2015, it should be remembered that Recep Tayyip Erdogan no longer governs the country alone.

The AKP is in fact in coalition with another party, the nationalist far-right MHP Party.

This coalition also explains this choice of an exclusively military solution against the PKK, legitimized by a nationalist and hawkish discourse against the Kurdish movement.

At the same time, this is accompanied in foreign policy by the emergence of a consensus around the idea that Turkey must reaffirm its sovereignty and question certain aspects of the international status quo resulting from the Treaty of Lausanne in particular.

It should be noted that this speech finds support beyond the ruling coalition, among a large part of the opposition political parties which support this policy of sovereignist affirmation.

And it is in this context that this new international ambition of Turkey can sometimes come into conflict with the strategies of some of its allies.

Why Turkey accuses the United States of supporting “Kurdish terrorists”?

Why Turkey accuses the United States of supporting “Kurdish terrorists”?

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