PJAK, the Iranian offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) with whom Turkish security forces have been fighting for more than two decades, has been behind a string of deadly attacks on security forces in northwestern Iran in recent months."Some of their bases are 10 kilometers (six miles) deep inside Iraqi territory, so this is part of our natural right to secure our borders," Gen. Yayha Rahim Safavi, military adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said over the weekend. "Of course we issued warnings to the Iraqi government and told it to take them [PJAK members] away from the border and respect its obligations," Safavi said in an interview with Iran's English-language television channel Press TV late Saturday.
"But unfortunately the Kurdistan region, the northern part of Iraq, did not listen, so we feel entitled to target military bases of PJAK and they have been under our artillery fire," Safavi, the former head of the elite Revolutionary Guard, said, while declining to elaborate on details of when the firings had taken place or if they were continuing.
Earlier this month, the outgoing top United Nations official in Iraq voiced concern over the intermittent shelling of areas in predominantly Kurdish northern Iraq. "Such incidents continue to cause damage and consternation among the civilian populations in these areas, disrupting their daily lives," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's special representative Ashraf Qazi said in a statement then. Last week, Qazi wrapped up his three-year term as the top United Nations envoy in Iraq and is preparing to take up his new assignment as chief UN officer for Sudan.
Previous to Safavi's remarks, Iranian officials had declined to confirm the charges, although Iraqi Kurds have been constantly complaining of Iran's shelling northeastern Iraq to strike PJAK bases there. Turkey has implicitly backed Iranian operations in Iraq, with President Abdullah Gül, the then-foreign minister, saying countries have the right to secure their borders. Turkish officials have denied any cross-border operation into northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists, but the Iraqi government complains that both Turkey and Iran resort to military measures affecting Iraqi territory.
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