The Struggle for Kirkuk

Oliver Poole
Former Iraq Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph
His new book, Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad, is to be published by Reportage Press in March.
You might have missed it as in most of the world it was not front page news but a NATO member attacked a sovereign state last week. Troops were amassed, as many as a 10,000 of them in some reports, and then poured across the border supported by combat helicopters and fighter jets.

Turkey’s action against PKK bases in northern Iraq may have been portrayed as a step by Ankara in the fight against “terrorism” but it still involved one country sending its forces into another without United Nations approval.

Such an act would normally expect to generate outrage and potentially calls for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. Yet in this case, remarkably, there was barely a flicker of protest.

The government in Baghdad voiced its “condemnation” of a “violation” of its borders but as Turkish soldiers fought their way across northern Iraq’s snow-bound mountains international reaction was notably muted.