Another Bush Legacy in Iraq: Barzani asks PKK to Leave

http://www.juancole.com/2015/08/another-legacy-barzani.html

Another Bush Legacy in Iraq: Barzani asks PKK to Leave
By Juan Cole | Aug. 2, 2015

~snip~

The Kurdish-speaking areas of Turkey are in turmoil after the guerrilla group, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) over the past year disregarded its peace process and launched attacks on Turkish military and security personnel. In the past two weeks, the Turkish government has also explicitly given up a “peace process” with the PKK Kurds and launched dozens of air strikes on PKK bases and safe houses.

By 2002, the Kurdish insurgency in eastern Turkey that erupted in the 1980s and after had wound down. Guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan had been captured and was negotiating.

Then in 2003 George W. Bush invaded Iraq, dissolved its army, and threw it into chaos.

In the midst of the chaos, some 5000 old Kurdish guerrillas from Turkey relocated into remote areas of the Kurdistan Regional Government, the Kurdish super-province. The paramilitary of this Iraqi super-province, the Peshmerga, were the closest US allies during the occupation. But they declined to move against the guerrillas from Turkey, having some ethnic affinity with them (though they are ideologically quite different. The Peshmerga serve a government in which the center-right Kurdistan Democratic Party takes the lead. The Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK is far left and had been communist in earlier decades).