Ankara will strike Kurdish PKK militant camps in the mountains of northern Iraq in Qandil, Sinjar and Makhmur if the Iraqi central government does not clear the area of militants, President Tayyip Erdoğan said on Thursday, ahead of June 24 elections.
Turkish AKP government already carries out regular cross-border air strikes against the PKK in northern Iraq. On Friday, the military said warplanes had struck shelters and weapons stations in Qandil and other areas.
Despite a 15-year reign in the Turkish parliament, upcoming elections could end the majority rule by Erdogan's AKP party.
Threats by AKP government officials to strike PKK, which has waged a decades-long armed conflict in Turkey, arrive in the midst of a heated election campaign dominated by nationalist bluster. This move is designed to win the ultra-nationalist vote in a possible runoff.
The Turkish military has previously conducted operations against Kurdish militants in Syria and in the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Tuesday that Baghdad was ready to coordinate with Ankara to prevent cross-border attacks into Turkey, and said Turkish soldiers had been in northern Iraq since the 1980s.
Turkish forces are stationed 30 km inside northern Iraq and could advance further to target Kurdish PKK militants in their Qandil Mountains stronghold, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım also said
"Our forces have now been positioned some 30 km into northern Iraq, working to prevent infiltrations and terror activities there," Yıldırım said in an interview on his plane as he campaigned for June 24 elections in eastern Turkey.
