Turkey will soon end its latest ground military operation in northern Iraq, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said.

Speaking to military academy graduates on Saturday, Erdogan hailed Operation Claw-Lock, which Ankara launched in April 2022, as a success. He said Kurdish fighters were now “incapable of acting inside our borders”.

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“We will close the lock very soon in the Claw Operation Zone in northern Iraq,” Erdogan said, according to the Reuters news agency.

The Turkish leader did not give a timeline for the end of the operation and it was not immediately clear what it would mean for the situation on the ground in northern Iraq and Syria, where Ankara has increased air raids in recent months.

Turkish forces have been sporadically fighting the northern-Iraq-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) for decades.  The PKK, which Ankara, the US and EU consider a “terrorist” group, first took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984.

Turkey began launching large-scale ground operations in northern Iraq against the PKK in the mid-1990s. It began incursions into Syria in 2015. Those operations targeted both Kurdish fighters and the ISIL (ISIS) armed group.

More than 40,000 people have been killed during the decades of fighting, with Turkish shelling in July of 2022 killing eight tourists, including a child, at a resort in the Kurdish Zakho district in northern Iraq.

In Syria, Turkish forces have targeted the Kurdish People’s Defence Units (YPG), which it regards as a wing of the PKK, as well as the Kurdish-led, US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces.

‘Fully determined’ to build buffer zone

In recent years, Ankara has repeatedly sought to build a buffer or “secure” area along its border with its southern neighbours, launching an operation in 2019 to take control of border areas of northern Syria following the abrupt withdrawal of US troops there.

Speaking to Politico earlier this month, Turkish Defence Minister Yasar Guler said that Ankara is “fully determined to create a 30-40 km [19 – 25-mile] deep security corridor along our Iraqi and Syrian borders and to completely clear the region of terrorists”.

“We will continue operations until the last terrorist is neutralised,” he said at the time.

Speaking on Saturday, Erdogan promised that Turkish forces will “complete the missing points of the security belt along our southern border with Syria”, the AFP news agency reported.