“Aiming to transmit commercial and cultural activities in [the] Kurdistan Region, [a] TRT Turk channel representative has recently visited the ministry of culture to get permission,” Judge Shaker Rozh Bayani, chief of staff at the Ministry of Culture of the regional Kurdish administration, was quoted as saying by the PUKmedia Web site, affiliated with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
Bayani also suggested that Turkey's recent initiative should be considered part of Ankara's ongoing steps taken to improve its political, cultural and economic ties with the Kurdish region. Turkey's relations with Iraqi Kurds, who run an autonomous region in northern Iraq, deteriorated significantly after the US-led war on Iraq in 2003 but began to make progress in the direction of normalization after the US started cooperating with the Turkish military in its fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which launches attacks on Turkey from its bases in northern Iraq. Turkish, Iraqi and US officials have embarked on joint efforts to deal with the PKK threat, and Iraqi Kurds are a part of these efforts.
