While the Iraqi government has made a huge deal out of the deployments of a few dozen Turkish military trainers into Kurdish territory in northern Iraq, Kurdish officials are insisting that Iraq and Turkey have a secret deal on a much larger deployment.
According to Kurdish Gen. Bahram Yasin, Turkey has over 1,000 ground troops in Iraq, backed by M60T Sabras tanks. The deployment is centered around the Nineveh Province, not far from the ISIS-held city of Mosul.
The Turkish forces are said to intermittently shell ISIS in the area around Mosul, and have their own base to the city’s northeast. The Kurdish Peshmerga insist they have no contact with the Turkish forces here, unlike the smaller group of trainers Iraq so loudly objected to.
This revelation suggests Turkey is much more directly involved in the ISIS war than they’re previously admitted, and also that the Abadi government in Iraq has been secretly accepting more foreign ground troops despite a number of top Iraqi political figures loudly objecting to that.
Very interesting – but is there any reliable confirmation? Telegraph has a clear political tendency and can’t really be trusted in these matters. And the Kurds also have their own agenda…
It seems extremely unlikely that the Turks are engaging ISIS in Iraq- while supplying them with arms and providing a pathway for foreign fighters in Syria, as well buying their oil and desperately battling Russia to keep their supply lines open.
It’s far more likely that any troops in Iraq independent of trainers are there to block the Kurds in case ISIS collapses. The Turks could move into any vacuum that might be created and keep the Kurds from taking any more ground.