assuming the Kurdish political structure has any influence over them [PKK] at all.
***That’s a difficult assumption to verify. If the Kurdish political structure did have influence, they would have been getting them to knock off the raids into Turkey. So it does appear that any influence is quite limited. And my impression of these kinds of groups that were originally funded by Marxists and trained by the KGB is that they aren’t really patriotic organizations. Kinda like how the KGB circumvented much of the IRA in Ireland and it took a lot of work to outmaneuver them — it only happened after KGB influence waned with the Berlin Wall coming down. So, if I were running the “Kurdish political structure”, I’d sell the PKK down the river in exchange for autonomy in eastern Turkurdistan, or whatever it’s called.
That is probably what the Kurds in the regional government in Iraq were hoping for all along. Many there do not want to be as radical as the PKK.
They have seen how nice capitalism is and probably just wanted to be rid of the PKK. They had just made an agreement with the rest of Iraq to split their oil with all of Iraq.
However, that will probably never come to be if Turkey goes after the PKK in the territory of the regional authority in Iraq.
Then again, the rest of Iraq was a bit jealous on how much oil the Kurdish Authority was sitting on in Iraq so this might be their excuse to go in and “protect” it.
Messy situation.