ANKARA: Looming over the deserted village of Sararo in northern Iraq, three Turkish military outposts break the skyline, part of an incursion that forced the residents to flee last year after days of shelling.
The outposts are just some of the dozens of new military bases Turkey has established on Iraqi soil in the past two years as it steps up its decades-long offensive against Kurdish militants sheltered in the remote and rugged region.
“When Turkey first came to the area, they set up small portable tents, but in the spring, they set up outposts with bricks and cement,” Sararo’s mayor Abdulrahman Hussein Rashid said in December during a visit to the village, where shell casings and shrapnel still litter the ground.
“They have drones and cameras operating 24/7. They know everything that’s going on,” he told Reuters, as drones buzzed overhead in the mountainous terrain 5 km from the frontier.Turkey’s advances across the increasingly depopulated border of Iraqi Kurdistan at-tract little global attention compared to its incursions into Syria or the battle against Islamic State, but the escalation risks further destabilising a region where foreign powers have intervened with impunity, analysts say. –Agencies
