SURUC, Turkey — The Turkish commandos came at dawn, surrounding this town on the Syrian border and hauling nine men off to jail.
It was July 24, just hours after Turkey announced a crackdown on the Islamic State in a major strategic shift for the nation. But the detained men had nothing to do with the militant group. Instead, they were suspected of links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. That group has fought a decadeslong war for autonomy for Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish minority.
As Turkey vowed last month to strike the Islamic State, it simultaneously opened a new front in its conflict with Kurdish rebels. It has launched scores of strikes on PKK strongholds across the border in northern Iraq and detained hundreds at home. The PKK, a Marxist-inspired group that the United States has deemed a terrorist organization, has also stepped up attacks, killing more than two dozen people in Turkey in recent weeks.
Turkish officials have said that both of its campaigns are part of the same fight against terrorism. But the fresh violence has also rekindled a dispute over Kurdish self-rule that threatens to destabilize Turkey and set off a wider conflict in a region already roiled by war.
“Here, it is a crime to be Kurdish now,” said Jalal Ipek, a resident of Suruc whose 20-year-old son was arrested in the July 24 raids. Police eventually detained 18 men from the Kurdish-majority town, residents and a local defense lawyer said.
“My son was sleeping, and they came to my house with guns,” Ipek said. “I asked them: ‘What is my son’s crime?’ They told me: ‘Don’t speak.’ ” The son, Abdelkader, remains in detention in the nearby city of Sanliurfa.
Last month, Turkey and the United States reached a landmark agreement to allow the U.S. military access to Turkey’s Incirlik air base for strikes on the Islamic State. The United States and allied nations have spent the past year bombing the group’s targets in Syria and Iraq.
But critics say Turkey has used the deal as cover to target Kurds.
“It is being utilized by the Turkish government in a way that serves them politically,” said Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “Specifically, it’s allowing them to raise the pressure on the PKK.”
There are several Kurdish rebel groups in Turkey, but the PKK — which is active in both Turkey and Iraq — is the country’s most militant.
The more than 14 million Kurds in Turkey are part of a wider Kurdish population that lives in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The countries have all sought to repress the Kurds, who maintain a distinct language and culture but have no state of their own. In Turkey, the government banned Kurds for years from speaking their own language in public. Authorities were worried that the large Kurdish minority would threaten Turkish identity.
But the government recently relaxed those restrictions. And in 2013, Turkey and the PKK reached what many thought was a historic agreement to halt the fighting and grant Kurds more rights.
Amid the tumult in the region, however, the accord soon fell apart. The Turkish government’s resistance to playing a bigger role in the U.S.-led coalition’s campaign against the Islamic State was an especially sore point among the Kurdish minority. Only recent events, including gains by the Islamic State along the border and signs that it is gaining a stronger foothold inside Turkey, appear to have prompted the government to act against the group.
Analysts say Turkey has long viewed the Islamic State as a bulwark against Syria’s Kurdish militias, which have made major territorial gains in that country’s north in recent months. The Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, has used U.S. air cover to rout the Islamic State from key areas in Syria. That has spooked Turkish officials, who fear that the advances could lay the foundation for a future Kurdish state.
