It was a matter of time. On Thursday, Turkish ground troops started to cross the Iraqi border and they initiated a mass offensive against the Kurdish militia group PKK. In October, the parliament gave the go ahead to the army for “necessary” military operations in Northern Iraq. Then we started to hear and see news about several air strikes but now things are getting serious.

I wanted to wait for a while before writing about the possible military operation in Northern Iraq. Two weeks ago the first steps for an extended military action are taken in a summit between heads of the military and the government and then the decision is voted in the parliament and deputies in parliament cast an overwhelming 507 votes in favour of the motion to 19 against, which permits the government to order military operations inside Iraq within the next year.

It’s that simple, Abdullah Gul is the new president of Turkey and this time, the army just couldn’t do anything. Now this is a good sign of modernization and Europeanization if you want to call it in that way. Is he a nice guy or can he represent the country as a leader (well almost a symbolic one but a leader after all)? I doubt it. The former president Ahmet Necdet Sezer had a modest and rather low profile image but he was respected and he played a great role if you think about the checks and balances in the country. He was some kind of a control mechanism over AKP and he did a pretty good job actually.