Turkish tanks and troops pulled back across the Habur border gate. Their departure marked the end of Operation Hammer, a multi-week incursion into the mountains of northern Iraq. The official troop count was 30,000. Their stated target was the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Turkish-Kurdish separatist group using the region as a base. Their unstated mission was to assist Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in its civil war against Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
The operation was a classic proxy intervention. Turkey, fearing an independent Kurdish state, sought to maintain a pliable Kurdish authority on its southern border. By bolstering Barzani's forces with artillery and ground support, they helped the KDP capture the PUK stronghold of Erbil. The conflict was a messy subplot of the post-Gulf War no-fly zone, where Iraqi sovereignty was absent and regional powers jockeyed for influence.
The withdrawal did not bring stability. It cemented a temporary KDP dominance but deepened regional resentment. The Turkish military would return, again and again, for cross-border raids against the PKK, a policy that continues decades later. The 1997 operation established a template: using military force to create a security buffer while manipulating intra-Kurdish politics. It demonstrated that the vacuum left by Saddam Hussein's weakened control in the north would be filled by complex, often violent, competition among Kurds and their neighboring states.