This story keeps reappearing, despite reports that he Turkish troops were withdrawn. And since when is Turkey friendly with the Peshmerga?
That entire situation is "complicated". There are so many factions with changing priorities, it's hard to track who's who.
One example for others unfamiliar; ISIS is Sunni. Many of its members are former Iraqi troops (Sunnis) who became disenfranchised under the now mostly Shia Iraq government.
So country is against country, sect against sect, and the greedy against everyone else in a constant flux and changing alliances.
A hell of a mess - thanks in no small part to our own abomination of desolation. Turkey friendly with the Peshmerga doesn't compute either. Must be either false or some temporary alliance?
“And since when is Turkey friendly with the Peshmerga?”
For the last few years.
Peshmerga used to used more as a general term for Kurdish fighters. Nowadays “Peshmerga” is used mostly to specifically refer to the Iraqi Kurdish fighters of the KDP party, headquartered in Erbil.
The leadership of the KDP (Barzani) has accomplished a significant diplomatic coup, by cultivating good relations with the Turkish regime (Erdogan). They have done this by clearly separating themselves from the PKK Kurdish Party that has been involved in a long guerrilla war against Turkey. Barzani also helped Erdogan in campaigning among the Kurdish minority in Eastern Turkey. But mostly Barzani got in good with Erdogan by cutting a big oil smuggling deal, which made Erdogan very rich.
It was a major scandal in Turkey a couple of years ago, and is coming back to light with Erdogan’s recently revealed oil smuggling from ISIS. Turkey was the only feasible route for the Iraqi Kurds to oil out to market, otherwise they would be run over roughshod by the Shi’ites running the Baghdad Government.
Erdogan has made smuggling oil from Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria his own family business, with his son Bilal running the tanker ship company to sell the oil internationally, and his son-in-law as the Turkish energy Minister, in charge of all the domestic transportation, storage and refining.