The withdrawal in October of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) from Turkiye and border areas of Iraqi Kurdistan has kickstarted a debate over Turkish bases in Iraq. With the “armed threat” that Ankara has long cited as justification for its presence seemingly receding, the rationale will likely need reformulating as Turkiye's military engagement in Iraq comes under ever greater scrutiny.

Whether Turkiye initiates a broader drawdown will likely depend on the future status of the Kurdish armed group's weapons, and Baghdad's ability to take on the security role Ankara says its troops fill. The Turkish government’s September pledge to hand over its Bashiqa-Zilkan base near Mosul to Iraq’s armed forces could provide a model for such a shift. However, at present it remains unclear whether it will serve as a precedent for deployments along the border.

The question lands on a crowded Iraqi agenda. Baghdad is pressing homegrown Shiite armed groups to place their weapons under state control, a process whose September deadline was pushed back to June 2027. Kata'ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada, one of those groups, has made the exit of Turkish troops a precondition for disarming. At the same time, with the US-led Coalition's mission over since Sept. 30, Turkish troops appear to have become the most visible foreign presence in Iraq—and a more prominent target of those demands.

What the PKK left behind

Since Oct. 2024, Ankara and the PKK have been engaged in a peace process under what Turkish officials call the "Terror-Free Turkiye" initiative. In an Oct. 8 statement, the PKK announced that its forces had vacated four tunnel positions on Mount Metina, a strategic position in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Dohuk Governorate.

The PKK framed its withdrawal not as a capitulation but as a challenge to Ankara. Citing a law passed by Turkiye's parliament in August setting out a legal framework for the PKK's disbandment, the Oct. 8 statement said the withdrawal left Ankara no grounds to cite an “armed threat” from the group. It further accused the Turkish government of taking no practical steps to advance the peace process.

The PKK’s statement did not say where its fighters had gone, what would happen to their weapons, or whether the group would keep operating inside Iraq. These are the questions on which any potential Turkish drawdown is likely to turn.

Who fills the vacated positions matters as much as the withdrawal itself, since a Turkish takeover would replace one armed presence with another rather than reduce it. Turkish security sources cited by Al-Monitor confirmed on Oct. 12 that the four PKK positions had been vacated. A report on Oct. 18 suggested that Turkish forces, not the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga, had since occupied the sites previously held by the PKK.

On Oct. 20, Turkish Defense Minister Yasar Guler told reporters that Turkiye would keep its troops in Iraq until it judged that border security had been ensured. A Turkish security official who spoke to Amwaj.media on condition of anonymity echoed Guler's remarks, linking the future of the military presence to whether the threat "truly" ends. The official attributed the deployment of troops in Iraq to what the source called Baghdad's longstanding unwillingness to act against the PKK.

"As a matter of principle, we have no eye on another country's territory. The effort devoted to deploying troops needs to have a rational justification. It does at present, but that may diminish," the official said.

Could Bashiqa provide a model?

Bashiqa, a Turkish base northeast of Mosul, is the one deployment Ankara has agreed to give up. The deal was struck on Sept. 23, two weeks before the PKK's announcement of a withdrawal from Mount Metina, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Al-Zaidi in New York. Turkiye said it established the compound in 2015 to support local forces fighting the Islamic State group (IS).

Although Bashiqa lies far from Sinjar, the agreement announced after the meeting tied its handover to the restoration of state authority in the Yazidi-majority district in Nineveh Governorate. The district lies near the Syrian border and hosts the PKK-linked Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS). Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has linked any drawdown to Baghdad disarming the PKK and affiliated groups, especially in Sinjar, the Iraqi news site Al-Masalah reported on Oct. 23. The deal thus appears bound up with the Kurdish armed group's future after all. In this vein, Iraqi authorities on Oct. 26 notably said YBS would disarm and integrate into the Iraqi military.


The bases Turkiye maintains inside Iraqi Kurdistan, near the border, are a different matter. Since Ankara launched its 'Claw' series of military operations against the PKK in 2019, it has built up a network of such sites. Bashiqa, far from that front line, may thus have been the easiest site to give up.

Baghdad's sovereignty test

Al-Masalah has framed the PKK's withdrawal as moving the problem from Turkiye into Iraq. On Oct. 11, the outlet described it as "a direct export of the Turkish crisis." Turkiye's August law on the PKK's disbandment answers part of that concern but not all of it. Most fighters will be able to return to Turkiye once their disarmament is verified, according to the Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat, which reported that some 230 senior PKK leaders are excluded and expected to live in a safe area in Iraq's Sulaimaniyah Governorate.

For its part, Baghdad insists that any solution on Sinjar must be its own. On Oct. 16, Sabah Al-Numan, spokesman for the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, told The New Region that "the issue of Sinjar is an Iraqi issue, and we do not allow anyone except the Iraqis to fix this problem." Numan added that the Turkish army would hand over responsibility for some bases inside Iraq to the Iraqi government on June 30.

As long as Baghdad presses Iraqi armed groups to disarm without a comparable framework for the PKK's weapons and members, it will struggle to remove the grounds Ankara cites for its presence.

Erbil has a stake of its own, with the PKK's headquarters in Qandil and Turkiye's outposts both sitting in Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani said on Oct. 12 that the peace process between Ankara and the PKK is "serious," and that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has "taken the steps required of us in relation to Ankara and Qandil."

A day later, KRG Interior Minister Reber Ahmed backed what he called Zaidi’s “policy of removing all foreign forces and non-Iraqi actors.” Neither statement addressed who would take over the positions the PKK vacated, a question the Oct. 18 report of a Turkish takeover has since sharpened.

Bound up with the factions' weapons

For Iraq's Iran-backed Shiite armed groups, the Turkish military presence and the PKK are tied together. Kata'ib Sayyid Al-Shuhada's Aug. 29 conditions for disarming paired the expulsion of PKK fighters with that of Turkish forces.

The following day, on Aug. 30, Badr Organization leader Hadi Al-Ameri, a senior figure in the ruling Shiite Coordination Framework, called for the exit of Turkish troops and the disarmament of "armed groups on Iraqi soil that threaten neighboring countries.” Asharq Al-Awsat read the statement as a reference to Iranian Kurdish opposition factions and Turkish Kurdish armed groups that are based in Iraqi Kurdistan.

That linkage could turn against Turkiye once the PKK question is settled. Speaking to Amwaj.media on condition of anonymity, a former senior Iraqi official said some Shiite armed groups would step up pressure to prevent Turkish forces from remaining in Iraq once the PKK issue is resolved. "This will put the Zaidi government in a tight spot. I think Ankara will also scale back its presence to avoid damaging relations," the official said.

The link also runs the other way. For Shiite armed groups, foreign troops are both a sovereignty question and a reason they cite for keeping their weapons, so a Turkish departure would remove one such reason without guaranteeing that they disarm.

Ankara's own timetable may decide how soon these questions come to a head. On Oct. 15, Erdogan's chief advisor Mehmet Ucum said he considered it highly likely that Turkiye's National Security Council would announce a decision on the peace process before the end of the year. Under the August law, that decision would formally declare the PKK's end and start a six-month process to reintegrate eligible members, according to Asharq Al-Awsat.

A PKK withdrawal does not make Turkiye's departure from Iraq automatic. But it does seem to weaken the case for maintaining existing deployments at their current scale. Whether Bashiqa becomes a model will depend on Baghdad taking full responsibility for security in areas previously held by the PKK, and, critically, on its doing so on terms acceptable to Ankara and other regional stakeholders.