6/26/20 Jason Ditz on Turkey, the Kurds and the India-China Border Dispute

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Okay, guys, on the line, I've got Jason Ditz.
He's the News Editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com, and he's got a whole series on this extremely important series of events.
Oh, man, I said series twice in a row like that.
That's just terrible.
A bunch of stuff happened.
Turkey attacked the PKK in northern Iraq, and then so did Iran, huh?
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
So June 17th, you wrote this thing, Turkey launches ground offensive against Kurds in northern Iraq.
And so who's who and what are they fighting about?
This has happened, honestly, a lot.
Turkey's been at war with the PKK, who are Kurdish separatists, since the 80s.
They consider them terrorists, like they consider most Kurdish groups.
And a few years ago, there was a very brief ceasefire that was supposed to lead to peace talks in Turkey.
And as part of that ceasefire deal, the PKK sent a lot of their forces into northern Iraq, like the really just barely still Iraq northern part of the country.
Iraqi Kurdistan's officials really didn't seem to mind at the time.
They thought they were helping out a regional ally.
But ever since that ceasefire collapsed, which was seems like a few weeks after it started, Turkey's been attacking the PKK in northern Iraq for fairly regularly, at least once a year.
And this time what's different is they're doing the same, you know, send some ground troops in and attack.
But Iran has actually gotten involved, to some extent, firing some rockets and artillery at the PKK as well.
Do you know, is there a recent crackdown on PJAK inside Iran or something like that?
There were reports of it a few weeks before this started.
PJAK, I'm sorry, everybody, that's sort of the Iranian branch of the Turkish PKK there.
Right.
Every, I mean, Kurds live in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
I mean, obviously they live elsewhere, but that's the historic Kurdistan.
And they've got little separatist groups in each of those countries.
And as far as Turkey's concerned, they're all PKK.
They're all basically run by the PKK, even though that's not really the case in some of those countries.
I'm not so sure about PJAK, the Iranian version.
But there were reports of some clashes in Iran with them.
Iran denied that that was the case and said everything was fine.
But now we see them firing on the PKK in Iraq and it kind of, it raises some questions.
Yeah.
So now the, I'm sorry, man, I forgot now.
I'm embarrassed.
Which one died?
Do you remember Barzani or Talabani?
Those are the two major warlords of northern Iraqi Kurdistan there.
I think it was Talabani that died, right?
I think so, yeah.
I'm sorry, man.
Anyway, so this isn't them, but this is the PKK.
They're quite separate from the PKK and their factions.
And yet, so I'm curious, is there any way to tell how much permission that they have given the PKK to hide out in Iraqi Kurdistan?
I mean, we're talking about a very mountainous region, so I don't know if they're just sneaking around on their own or if they have permission to be there by the ruling factions, do you know?
Well, at the time when they got there, during that brief ceasefire with Turkey, it seemed like the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq was more or less fine with it.
There was no real objection to them coming in.
And that part of Iraq is so sparsely populated.
It's all mountains and tiny little villages.
And it was like they didn't really seem to care.
Even for them, it was like an insignificant region.
They felt like, wow, that'll be fine.
Which is interesting because that political bloc in Iraq is one of the few major Kurdish political blocs in the region that doesn't generally get along with the PKK.
They see the PKK and the YPG as kind of contrary to their interests.
And sometimes there's some, I mean, there's a lot of political fighting.
Sometimes it's escalated into actual violence, but it seemed like they were fine with them coming.
I don't think they imagined the PKK would still be there.
This is a few years after the fact.
I don't think they imagined that Turkey would be attacking the northern provinces so regularly, which the Iraqi central government has been complaining about every time it happens.
I mean, they say, well, no, Turkey can't send troops in here.
They're not allowed.
That's a violation of our sovereignty, which it is, but Turkey does it anyway and it just sort of happens.
So as far as Iraq is concerned, so far they haven't really been able to do anything about it.
And now, what's this about the UAE?
Who are they bankrolling there and what do they got to do with it all?
The UAE, when this first happened, like the first day when the reports came out of attacks, issued a statement backing the Iraqi government at the Arab League saying, Iraq is right.
Turkey has no business doing this or violating the sovereignty of an Arab state and they have to stop.
And Iran, too, although it was really more aimed at Turkey.
Now, the UAE's interest in this, I think, is mostly just being mad at Turkey over what happened in Libya.
I know.
I was wondering that.
It sounds like that is what it is, right?
And there are...
I feel like Turkey came in to Libya backing the opposite side from who the UAE was backing in that civil war, and all of a sudden, the tides turned just huge and quick, where General Haftar that the UAE was backing in what's basically been a coup attempt, he went from controlling basically the whole east of Libya and a good chunk of the area around Tripoli to now he's lost pretty much everything in the west and has been pushed back into just part of the east.
So, I mean, he's lost big time.
Turkey made a deal with the government of national accord, which is the rival force in Libya for oil and gas exploration rights in the Mediterranean.
Which is a really weird, if you look at a map, it's weird to think about, but the maritime rights of Libya and Turkey actually do kind of intersect.
Hmm.
Yeah, I see it.
I actually got a big map here for exactly that reason.
Yeah.
Kind of bisect the Mediterranean there.
I like how it's just business.
In the Syria war, the Turks and the UAE, they might have backed competing militias, but they were both working to overthrow Assad.
Here they're outright on opposite sides and it's all about the petroleum.
Right.
And, wow, that's really all Libya has.
I mean, realistically, you've got oil fields in the interior of the country and huge oil ports on the coast.
And that's basically Libya.
Everything else is kind of non-consequential for any foreign powers.
You've got to control the oil fields enough to get them pumping and you have to control the ports enough to get boats out of there.
As far as the attacks on the PKK there in northern Iraq, I mean, not to play down those deaths, but again, because this isn't the ruling faction they're attacking or anything like that.
They're basically guerrillas off in the mountains.
So it doesn't seem like the kind of situation where there's a lot of collateral damage of neighborhoods being bombed or anything crazy like that.
Right.
No, although there have been reports of some Iraqi Kurdish civilians getting caught up in it.
Yeah.
You know, if you look at that northernmost Iraqi province, there's a lot of rural roads up in the mountains and they'll get hit with airstrikes.
And it's, you know, you're hitting any time a car passes by, you're just kind of hoping that's your target because that's basically the U.S. strategy of airstrikes, which is hit anything that moves.
Turkey seems to have picked up on that.
But yeah, I mean, obviously they have some ideas where there's some small caves or villages or whatnot where they're living and they can get them directly there.
But other than that, you're just looking for targets of opportunity and sometimes that's going to be civilians.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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But all this is over now?
It seems to have quieted down quite a bit, although I don't know that...
I mean, like you say, it's been coming and going since the Bush years, but yeah.
Right.
I mean, one of the first things that happened when the U.S. invaded Iraq was that Turkey invaded, on a smaller scale, Turkey invaded northern Iraq to go after Kurds.
And that still happens sometimes, but it's not really something that is probably going to stop anytime soon.
Like you say, they're not hitting tons of people with these airstrikes or these ground offensives.
It's not like that a few day ground offensive is done and they're like, well, all the PKK are out of Iraq now.
There's doubtless more left, and it's going to be a pretext for more offensives in the future.
Yeah.
All right.
So move a few thousand miles over to the east here, to the Himalayan mountains, where the Chinese and the Indians had their dispute.
I talked with Eric Margulies about this a bit last week, and if you can give us a little bit of an outline of the status of that conflict right now.
Well, it's really interesting because, again, if you look at this on a map and sort of get satellite images of the line of control, because, you know, a lot of these countries in that part of South Asia don't really have proper borders.
They have lines of control.
It's like, well, China controls this side, India controls this side, Pakistan controls this side, and everybody's disputing exactly where the border should be in the future.
But if you look at it on the map and in the satellites, you realize especially the India-China line of control is a whole lot of nothing.
I mean, the world's two largest population countries and their border is this rocky sort of mountainside near the Seichen Glacier.
Almost nobody lives there.
There's troop patrols go by on both sides, and that's the most activity either side really gets in the border region.
So it's not like they're fighting over something valuable.
It just becomes a matter of national pride that the other side can't violate their borders.
Right.
Does that also mean, though, that since there's so little at stake, that it's easy for them to back down and so don't worry too much?
You would think so, but when they make it about national pride, they tend to insist that they're not going to back down.
Neither side wants to be seen as the one that backed away from a conflict and might lose some credibility that way.
But at the same time, China-India is really puzzling.
They had one war in this area decades ago, and both sides kind of pride themselves on the fact that neither side's troops have fired on the other side's troops in 40-some years.
Yeah.
I mean, these guys were killed with baseball bats with barbed wire wrapped around them or something like that, right?
Right, right.
Boards with nails through it or something is what I read.
Right.
I pictured Moses Lack chasing the aliens on the Halloween episode of The Simpsons, you know?
Right.
And there was a picture of some of India's, I guess, arms in this case, and it was really kind of gruesome because it looked like just a bunch of rebar and...
Rebar, sweet.
That's gangster as hell.
I mean, hey, it's better than them all blowing each other away with AKs, I guess.
It's interesting that the governments won't allow them to carry guns or else they would have used their AKs, right?
It's really a puzzling situation.
I mean, you think about upwards of 60 people got killed between the two sides doing this with no guns.
These are both nuclear powers with major militaries, and they're fighting with sticks and boards with nails and barbed wire, and the picture I saw of one of India's sort of sets of rebar and other assorted equipment wrapped in barbed wire is kind of gruesome because it's got blood on it and everything from hitting Chinese people with it.
But yeah, I mean...
I'm thinking about that joust between the Daggers and the Valley Kids and thrashing.
It sounds brutal.
It would be really scary if these two sides were trying to kill each other with the weapons that they actually have available instead of just what they can get away with without losing their...
And no guns have been fired in this area.
But yeah, I mean, it's quite out of hand, and honestly, a lot more out of hand than either side of that border is worth.
India's never going to...
Both sides say the other started it, but India's never going to get deep enough into China to take anything valuable, and China's never going to get deep enough into India and Kashmir to take anything valuable.
So really, there's no point to this fight.
It's just, they're mad, and there was enough sticks and bats and whatnot that they figured out how to kill each other with them.
But I mean, I had read one headline where it said, the Chinese are kind of backing down, and then I read...
See, you can tell how lazy I'm getting in my old age.
I didn't really read the article, Jason, but I saw a headline that said, Chinese backing down some...
And then I saw another headline that said, Chinese talking about the Indians again, rashing up tensions there.
So it doesn't look like it's over yet, but at least the killing's over for now, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that particular flare-up is over, but after that happened, which he had 20, 30 troops on either side, which is about normal for that region, just kind of keeping an eye on each other.
Since that's happened, both sides have sent a lot more troops.
I don't know if they're armed yet, but they sent a lot more troops.
China's built a couple of kind of observation posts at the top of hills, looking down on the line of control.
Most of China's statements are that India is fully to blame for everything that happened and that they're not going to stand for it.
India's statement is like, well, we don't really want to see this escalate, but we're not going to back down either.
So nothing really got resolved, but at least it kind of stopped for the time being.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, man, we're all out of time, but you got a hundred more important news stories here at news.antiwar.com.
Urge everybody to go over there and check it out and get caught up on all of, well, not just America's wars, but some of these other conflicts too.
Great stuff as always, Jason.
Thank you.
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