On Sunday, a representative of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (or PKK) threatened that the group would use suicide attacks against American interests in the area in response to American support for Turkey in their battle against the PKK.
The PKK has long fought for a Kurdish homeland in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. Turkey has accused the PKK of using northern Iraq as a safe haven to launch attacks into southern Turkey. For the past few months Turkey has been launching air strikes and ground raids against PKK strongholds in northern Iraq, including air strikes over the weekend that Turkey claimed killed more than 150 PKK fighters.
Peritan Derseem, a representative for an Iran-based faction of the PKK, said that the Turkish raids were conducted with information gathered from the United States, so now the group was considering retaliation not against the Turks, but against the US. She claimed that some members of the groups now were looking to join suicide squads, and that for now the group was against such attacks, in the future that feeling could change.
The Kurdish north of Iraq, in drastic contrast to other parts of the country, has been relatively calm since the 2003 invasion.
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