Kurdish PKK forces are withdrawing from Iraqi territory along the Turkish border on Friday, following reports earlier in the week that the Iraqi and Turkish governments reached a deal allowing Turkey to carry out cross-border attacks.
Turkey’s Erdogan government has talked escalating attacks against the Kurds after taking Afrin District over the weekend. Erdogan suggested Turkey might even go so far as to sack Sinjar, a Yazidi city in Iraq. The PKK ar taking this seriously.
Indeed, the PKK announced that they are withdrawing from Sinjar, on the grounds that their military goal, to protect the Yazidis from ISIS, has already been accomplished. The fighters are going deeper into Iraq, apparently hoping Turkey won’t pursue them this deep.
The PKK is based in Turkey, and has been seeking secession for the Kurdish southeast. PKK forces moved into Iraq substantially in recent years during a ceasefire, pending peace talks. Since the talks collapsed, Turkey has been increasingly attacking the PKK, and other Kurds in general.
More to the point, the Iraqi Kurd Barzani clan’s on-again, off-again bargain with Turkey appears to be on again. Their official line is that the PKK-Turkish dispute is an internal Turkish matter.
Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) only tolerated PKK infiltration of Iraq so long as external opponents like the IS were a problem. Any threat to KDP dominance of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) wasn’t going to stand.
Apart from inciting Turkish intervention, the PKK was pushing for KRG representation, going so far as to sponsor their own KRG party. An alliance with the Talibani clan Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) would have been the seeds of another Kurdish civil war in Iraq.