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The United States’ suspension of a hitherto unreported joint covert intelligence-gathering drone operation with Turkey against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is yet another indication of strained ties between the two NATO alliance members. It’s unclear, however, whether this will have any adverse effects on the ongoing Turkish operations against the group.
Reuters revealed on Wednesday that Operation Nomad Shadow, which began in 2007, was suspended last October.
In the operation, US drones flew over the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan and took high-resolution images of PKK positions. It shared these images with the Turkish military, enabling Ankara to locate and target the group.
The US suspended Nomad Shadow, likely indefinitely, in response to Turkey’s Peace Spring military offensive against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northeast Syria in October.
“Now that this program has been shut off, I don’t see how it gets turned back on,” Aaron Stein, the Middle East director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told Rudaw English.
“The initial intent was to give Turkey some capabilities to counter the PKK, as it gained strength following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003,” he said.
“The program was, therefore, at its core, about alliance management.”
The reason for this, Stein explained, was because the US “does not and really never has viewed the PKK as a threat”.
“The group is a clear threat to Turkey and Ankara views US actions as making that threat worse,” he said.
“Therefore, the US provided things to manage that threat to Turkey, which is basically about reassuring Ankara.”
After the US began directly supporting the YPG in its fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) group, it continuously sought to reassure Ankara that it still supported it in its campaign against the PKK.
Washington repeatedly insisted that the YPG and PKK are distinct while reaffirming that it still designated the latter a terrorist organization.
In November 2018, the US State Department placed multi-million-dollar bounties on three PKK leaders. Ankara, however, remained dissatisfied, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declaring: “We know very well how those who declare PKK terrorists and place bounties on their leaders work together with them.”
The suspension of Nomad Shadow may indicate that the US is giving up on its attempts at delicately balancing its strategic alliance relationship with Turkey and its far more ad-hoc tactical relationship with the YPG in light of Operation Peace Spring.
It is also indicative of Washington’s deep displeasure with Ankara’s offensive and its increased willingness to suspend such joint initiatives with it.
This has put Ankara in a bind. Stein noted that any move on Turkey’s part to lift the program’s suspension “would suggest Ankara actually needs these US drones”.
“Beyond basic security, this would entail tacitly admitting that Turkish drones need help,” he said, which would be “politically problematic” for Ankara.
“Ankara has built up its own capabilities that do more than what this program was providing, so while the US systems are more capable than Turkey’s, they do not do so much more to make the political cost of indicating a reliance on the US worth it for the civilian leadership,” Stein said.
It remains unclear just how substantially this suspension has, or will, directly affect Turkey’s overall ability to target the PKK in the Kurdistan Region.
“This [suspension] makes the anti-PKK campaign more difficult and more costly for Turkey,” claimed one US official cited by Reuters.
However, Nomad Shadow was arguably much more useful for Turkey when it began in 2007 since Ankara hadn’t yet developed a formidable drone capability at the time.
In 2007, the Turkish military’s only drones were a small fleet of old unarmed American-made General Atomic Gnat 750 reconnaissance drones it purchased in 1995. Ankara later purchased a fleet of IAI Heron drones from Israel in 2010.
Since then, Turkey successfully developed several indigenously-built drones, both armed and unarmed, that are by most accounts quite effective. Today, Turkey’s drones frequently fly over the Kurdistan Region and have assassinated several senior PKK officials in the past two years.
Beginning in August 2018, with its assassination of senior PKK member Zaki Shingali, Ankara demonstrated its capability of directly locating and targeting the PKK leadership.
Turkey’s subsequent assassination of senior PKK members over the past year, including Serhat Varto and Diyar Gareeb, amply demonstrated the advancements in Turkey’s strike capabilities in recent years.
It’s unclear, however, how much, if any, US intelligence gathered through Nomad Shadow contributed to the success of these targeted assassinations.
While the suspension of that operation certainly constitutes yet another setback in US-Turkish relations, it may not constitute a major military setback for Turkey in its perennial conflict with the PKK.
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