Energetic US diplomacy may have headed off – for the time being – the threat of a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq.

Turkey wants to see the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerilla bases in northern Iraq closed down. The PKK, a Stalinist-nationalist organisation based in the Kurdish areas of Turkey – and now with bases in Iraq – launched an armed struggle against the Turkish state in 1984.

37,000 people have died during the PKK-Turkish conflict. In the mid-1990s thousands of villages were destroyed in the Kurdish south-east of Turkey, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled to cities in other parts of the country.

In the 1990s, the PKK organisation stepped back from its demand for an independent Kurdish state, calling instead for more autonomy for the Kurds. More recently the PKK declared a cease-fire, which broke down in 2004.

Recent PKK attacks have killed both Turkish soldiers and civilians.

On 17 October the Turkish parliament passed a motion allowing the government to use force against the PKK in northern Iraq. The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Islamist-lite Justice and Development party (AK) and the secular-nationalist army leadership have other reasons – beyond destroying the PKK – to consider an invasion of northern Iraq. The existence of a largely autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq is unsettling for them – giving, as it does, the 15 million oppressed Kurds in eastern Turkey a possible example to follow.

The US is eager not to see foreign armies openly intervening in Iraq. A Turkish invasion would not only open the Turks to the possibility of being bogged down – much as Israel was in Lebanon – but widen a rift with the US.

Turkey defied the Americans when it signed a gas-pipeline deal with Iran last July, and has been angered by a US government committee’s decision to label the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottoman empire (between 1915-23) as “genocide”.

Turkish opinion polls now show that only 10% of Turks hold a “favourable opinion of the US”.