Turkey seeks to achieve double goal in Iraq: Pundit

Press TV has interviewed William Beeman, professor at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, to discuss Turkey’s deployment of troops to northern Iraq.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Certainly for a country like Turkey which apparently is quite sensitive about its own airspace not being violated as we have seen with the Russian jet incident, it sort of defies logic that it is okay though staying in Iraq while the country wants it out?

Beeman: It is kind of a question of he said, she said. Prime Minister Erdogan is claiming that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had invited the Turkish troops in 2014. And the [Iraqi] government including Prime Minister al-Abadi has said that this is a complete lie. So it is difficult to sort this out.

But one of the things that is pretty clear is that Turkey would probably like to achieve a kind of a double goal and the first is they would like to participate with the United States because Turkey is a NATO country in containing ISIS, ISIL, Daesh but at the same time they have situated themselves in the Kurdish region and they would like to be able to have some control over the Kurds and especially over the PKK which threatens Turkey.

So one could say on the part of the Iraqis that the Turkish government has found a benefit in stationing troops in Iraq ... their troops would also simultaneously control Kurdish incursion and Kurdish attacks on the Turkish government in Turkey from their Iraqi base.

Press TV: The US so far has said that Turkey’s deployment of troops for training was legitimate and fine and it is standing behind Turkey at this point but obviously now Iraq has sent this formal letter, I believe, of complaint to the UN Security Council, and I believe Russia, too, has done something along those lines. What do you think will happen now?

Beeman: Well I really do not know. I think that we have a situation where Turkey is practically the United States’ only ally in the region outside of perhaps Jordan and well Israel of course. So the United States has a very strong stake in having the Turkish troops in Iraq as a way of increasing the troops’ size to fight ISIS, ISIL or Daesh.

But as we have seen, every foreign power that is working in Iraq and in Syria has some ulterior motive aside from containing ISIS, ISIL or Daesh and in this case the Turks have this, I believe, ulterior motive of controlling the PKK and controlling the Kurds.

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