News From Antiwar.com
Today the nation’s leading newspaper,
Hürriyet, reported that two Turkish soldiers were killed in Iraq in what was routinely termed a cross-border anti-terror operation in the north of the country. As though Turkey reserves the right to wage armed incursions into neighboring countries that is denied the other nations of the world. The excuse for the latest raids, part of the Turkish military’s ongoing Operations Pençe-Şimşek (Clawed Lightening) and Pençe-Yıldırım launched last week, was that the Turkish troops violating the border of sovereign Iraq were attacking forces of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The same excuse, that of combating the PKK and affiliated groups, is used to excuse Turkey’s invasion and occupation of northeastern Syria since 2014, including its so-called Operation Peace Spring of 2019.