ANKARA, Turkey — President Barack Obama’s stepped-up partnership with Turkey in fighting the Islamic State may come at the cost of alienating another key group he’s counting on for help in the same conflict: the Kurds.
To Obama’s relief, Turkey has finally started bombing Islamic State targets in neighboring Syria, and agreed to let the U.S. military launch airstrikes from key air bases inside Turkey in a deal announced last week. But in an unexpected twist, Turkey simultaneously started shelling Kurdish rebels in Iraq, where Kurds have proven unusually capable of wresting back territory from the Islamic State militants with the help of air support from the U.S.-led coalition.
The White House has publicly sided with Turkey, endorsing the NATO ally’s right to defend itself against recent deadly attacks in Turkey by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. But Iraq’s prime minister says the Turkish strikes violate Iraq’s sovereignty, and U.S. officials have quietly signaled they’re urging Turkey to lay off.
It’s a dizzying array of alliances that illustrates Obama’s paucity of good options for partners in his campaign against the Islamic State, an extremist Sunni militant group known in Arabic as Daesh. The U.S. considers the PKK, which has waged a long insurgency in Turkey, to be a terrorist group, but is supporting and equipping other Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria that share the PKK’s goal of defeating the Islamic State.
