Mosul and Iraq´s next war

Daniel Pipes - About 100,000 Turkish troops, backed by aircraft and tanks, are poised to enter Iraq for counterterrorism purposes. But once there, they might just stay permanently, occupying the Mosul area, leading to dangerous regional consequences.
To understand this danger requires a refresher in Turkish irredentist ambitions harking back to the 1920s. The Ottoman Empire emerged from World War I on the losing side, a predicament codified in 1920 by the Treaty of Sèvres imposed on it by the victorious Allies. With Kemal Atatürk's military victories of 1919-22 and the reassertion of Turkish power, however, Sèvres was never applied. Instead, the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923, established all of Turkey's present borders but for the one with British-occupied Iraq. For Iraq, Lausanne stipulated a provisional boundary.
The Kuwait War of 1991 led to a further collapse in Iraqi authority north of the 36th parallel, prompting Turkish forces to engage in hot pursuit across the border 29 times, feeding Ankara's Mosul ambitions. These aspirations culminated in 1995, when approximately 35,000 Turkish troops entered northern Iraq in "Operation Steel," leading Turkey's President Süleyman Demirel explicitly to re-open the 1926 file: "The border is wrong," he said. "The Mosul Province was within the Ottoman Empire's territory“. More...