Turkey Invades Iraqi Kurdistan With 10,000 Troops
Days after a major terror attack killed 24 Turkish troops inside areas claimed for a Kurdish republic, Turkey has launched a major military offensive inside Iraq. The area in Northern Iraq, a Kurdish autonomous enclave, has been invaded by 10,000 Turkish troops in the hunt for PKK terrorists.
The offensive began Wednesday after Kurdish rebels carried out raids near the Turkey-Iraq border that killed 24 Turkish soldiers and wounded 18, the insurgents’ deadliest one-day attacks against the military since the mid-1990s.
The military said in a statement Thursday that 22 battalions, or about 10,000 soldiers, were taking part in the offensive in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, but it did not say how many were in each country.
NTV television said most of the troops were believed to be in Iraq.
It was Turkey’s largest such offensive since February 2008, when thousands of ground forces staged a weeklong offensive into Iraq on snow-covered mountains.