Turkey to soon wind down latest operation in northern Iraq, Erdogan says
Al Jazeera
Ankara has carried out repeated ground operations against Kurdish fighters, launching its most recent in 2022.
Turkey will soon end its latest ground military operation in northern Iraq, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said.
Speaking to military academy graduates on Saturday, Erdogan hailed Operation Claw-Lock, which Ankara launched in April 2022, as a success. He said Kurdish fighters were now “incapable of acting inside our borders”.
“We will close the lock very soon in the Claw Operation Zone in northern Iraq,” Erdogan said, according to the Reuters news agency.
The Turkish leader did not give a timeline for the end of the operation and it was not immediately clear what it would mean for the situation on the ground in northern Iraq and Syria, where Ankara has increased air raids in recent months.
Turkish forces have been sporadically fighting the northern-Iraq-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) for decades. The PKK, which Ankara, the US and EU consider a “terrorist” group, first took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984.
