February is not a great month to invade northern Iraq. The mountains of the Kurdish autonomous region are foreboding year around, which is precisely why they teem with guerilla bases of the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK, a militant group at war with neighboring Turkey. But in winter, the mountains become an easy place for a foreign army to get stuck in the snow and die in the cold.
It may be a measure, then, of just how eager the Turkish military is to confront the PKK that it got a jump on the spring thaw by sending a reported 10,000 Turkish troops into northern Iraq Thursday, despite the weather. Turkey's goal appears to be to pre-empt the spring build-up of PKK fighters moving from Iraq into Turkey. The Turks have advanced some six miles into Iraq and blown up a few bridges, and say they will return home to their warm bases as soon as possible.
But there's little doubt they'll be back in Iraq soon, in even larger numbers. Determined as the Turks may be, their military efforts have failed to solve the PKK problem since the 1980's when Kurds in southeastern Turkey began rebelling against discrimination by the Turkish state. There's little reason to believe that the military option will work this time, either. Most of the PKK's fighters in Iraq are based well away from the Turkish border, and there are plenty still running around inside Turkey as well.
Iraq's Kurds suspect that the real aim of the Turkish military incursion is not so much to wipe out the PKK, as it is to harass the Kurdish region that is increasingly behaving as a state in the making. Turkey has long been hostile to the very idea of an autonomous — let alone independent — Kurdistan, which they fear would incite secessionist feelings among Turkey's own Kurdish minority. At the same time, Iraq's Kurdish leaders have been unwilling to move against the PKK, having tried and failed to defeat them during the 1990s. Instead, they have urged Turkey to seek a political solution to the conflict through peace talks and amnesty. And they're readying their own peshmerga militias to resist Turkey's incursion if they deem that their own people and territory are under attack.
For now, however, Iraqi Kurds are likely to avoid confrontation. They are a landlocked people surrounded by enemies, and they know they need to keep the trade routes to Turkey open to have any chance of sustaining what peace and prosperity the one calm corner of Iraq affords. Whether the Turkey-PKK conflict allows that calm to persist, however, remains to be seen.