When Bashar Assad pulled his forces out of northern Syria and allowed PKK militants to takeover he was trying to take revenge from Turkey. Assad was angry that Turkey did not support his atrocities against the Syrian masses, so he installed the PKK on our borders. It is no secret that the Assad regime has always cooperated with the PKK and actually used it to undermine Turkey's security by providing them with bases in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and also in the Latakia city where PKK chieftain Abdullah Öcalan was holed up for years… Bashar and his father Hafez al-Bashar used the PKK against Turkey.

The irony of it all is the fact that while cooperating with the secessionist PKK terrorists both Hafez and his son Bashar Assad denied the Kurds basic citizenship rights and 1.5 million Kurds living in the northern Syria were treated as ghost who had no rights.

The PKK used its Syrian affiliate the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military wing the People's Protection Units (YPG) to hijack the Syrian Kurdish political movement and forced many Kurdish politicians and opinion makers to flee or just eliminated them by murdering or sending them to jail.

Now Bashar Assad calls the PYD and the YPG, who collaborated with the Americans, traitors…

These days the PKK has set its eyes on northern Iraq. The PKK terrorists feel they can exploit the current chaotic atmosphere in northern Iraq that surfaced after September's independence referendum, which turned into a great fiasco… The Barzani administration dragged the Kurdish people of Iraq into a nightmare. The Kurds have lost the lands they grabbed from Iraq claiming these are disputed territories including oil-rich Kirkuk and now face serious sanctions from the central government in Baghdad.

The people have turned against the Barzani and the Talabani family that are respectively dominant in Irbil and Sulaymaniyah. They feel these families have been involved in corruption and mismanagement of the region and thus they should go. The PKK sees this as an opportunity to use the dissatisfaction of the masses to its advantage. Thus they are playing a similar game they staged in northern Syria.

Earlier this week the PKK announced it is setting up an administration in the Qandil Mountains and will run the region with an assembly. The terrorist organization, acting like a local administration, also said it controls the Balbayan, Navdesht, Kalavuta and Mardu regions and is running these regions through its own administration.

So they have set the stage to try and grab power all over the Kurdish region in Iraq.

The PKK claims it has established a people's assembly and will run these regions according to its own rules but adds that it will also respect the rules and laws established by the Kurdistan Regional Government. This is supposed to ease the concerns of the Barzani administration that these people [the PKK] have bad intentions. So all this should be a source of concern not only for Ankara and Tehran but also for the central government in Baghdad. It is up to the Abadi administration to prevent a fait accompli.