In an interview in northern Iraq with The Associated Press, Karayılan said, “The date of the Turkish offensive has drawn near.” The interview was held at his base in the remote village of Lewzhe in northern Iraq on Friday. “We are ready to confront it and to defend ourselves. The Turkish army cannot move with ease in this mountainous terrain,” he added.Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has threatened to stage an incursion into northern Iraq if talks with Iraq and the US after the elections fail to produce effective results against the PKK presence there. “Anything can happen; [military operations] could come onto the agenda,” Erdoğan said in an interview on the private ATV channel Thursday night, when asked whether a cross-border offensive would be considered after the elections. “Whatever is necessary could be done immediately. We are capable enough to do it.”
Erdoğan’s nationalist rivals in the elections have criticized him for being too soft in the fight against the PKK, designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US and the European Union.
Karayılan denied charges that the PKK was using its bases in Iraq to launch attacks against Turkish forces. He also denied that the Iraqi Kurdish leadership running northern Iraq was supporting his group and said his group’s bases in northern Iraq were primarily political indoctrination centers. The AP, however, cited an account by one of its reporters that the PKK terrorists were going through training on the use of light arms and doing endurance drills in full combat gear on the way to Lewzhe.
“The arms market and merchants are our main sources of weapons,” said Karayılan who, by way of giving an example of how his group procures weapons, recounted how his militants recently ambushed and commandeered an Iranian truckload of weapons that was on its way to Lebanon. He said he commands a force of about 10,000.
Karayılan also claimed that any Turkish military incursion into northern Iraq would not be undertaken to smash PKK bases as Turkey claims but, he contended, to thwart efforts by Iraq’s Kurds to annex the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. “If the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan wins Kirkuk, that will be a huge economic asset,” he said. “So, an incursion into Iraq will not take place because of our bases, but because of Turkey’s concerns about the Kurdish entity in Iraq.”
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