Turkey ready to attack militias in north Iraq

Turkey is preparing for an attack on Kurdish militias in northern Iraq, a move that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hopes will win him support before presidential and parliamentary elections this month.

The Turkish army has established 11 new bases in Iraq, most of them close to its own border and Iran.

The area is a stronghold for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militia formed in eastern Turkey in the early 1980s that has spread into Iraq and Syria.

‘‘We have doubled our presence in northern Iraq. Our objective is to eliminate terrorism before terrorists can infiltrate our border,’’ Binali Yildirim, the Turkish prime minister, said.

The Turkish army has pushed about 25 kilometres into Iraqi territory and in some cases built roads to the new military bases from Turkey.

It has also established outposts in territory north of the city of Dohuk by driving out PKK troops with almost daily airstrikes.

There are other Turkish troops around Bashiqa, north of Mosul, where they have been fighting alongside Kurdish peshmerga forces, and close to Sinjar, the Yazidi town where Islamic State carried out a massacre in August 2014.

All the new bases are in territory controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the main political power in the region, with close security ties to Turkey. The rival faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), opposes Turkey’s presence there.

‘‘There are about 700 villages in the area controlled by the PKK. If Turkey attacks it will cause another refugee crisis,’’ a PUK source said.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist group in Turkey, the EU and the US.

However, its subsidiaries are at the fore of the fight against Isis, winning the backing of western powers and seizing huge tracts of territory.

That has infuriated Turkey, which is the main target of the PKK’s aggression.

The crumbling of a ceasefire between the two sides in July 2015 has led to violence in eastern Turkey in which more than 3000 people have been killed.

Turkey has already launched one operation against a PKKaffiliated group, the Syrian YPG, this year. Support at home for the operation in Afrin was high, with even Erdogan’s opponents backing it. – The Times Guatemala’s Fuego volcano has erupted again, emergency services said, just two days after claiming 70 lives in an initial eruption.

The new explosion unleashed lava on the southern flank of the 3763 metres Volcan de Fuego, located about 69 kilometres southwest of Guatemala City.

The new eruption could release ashes and hot gases, the National Institute of Seismology warned.

Six localities were evacuated, according to the institute. Rescuers, doctors and journalists