YUKSEKOVA, TURKEY — In a town where the pictures of dead Kurdish guerrillas adorn certain walls as tributes to their martyrdom, warnings of war along the Turkish-Iraqi border are achingly familiar.
Turkey's threat to invade northern Iraq has left people in this predominantly Kurdish region nervous and suspicious, recalling the bad years of the mid-1990s, the period of the largest Turkish incursions and heavy-handed counterinsurgency campaigns. Fighting was heavy, death tolls high, and entire villages cleared out to destroy rebel support networks.
No one was predicting Tuesday that Turkey was about to return to that level of authority. But quite a few people said it would be a bad idea.
"Everyone in Turkey would suffer," Yuksekova Mayor Mehmet Salih Yildiz said in an interview at the headquarters of his Kurdish political party, which this year has representatives in the Turkish national parliament for the first time.
"We have been living with big pressure for years and are very used to the situation, but Turkey is not," he said.
Two of Yildiz's sons were killed as fighters for the Kurdish rebel force known as the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, and a daughter remains "in the mountains" with PKK units taking shelter across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Yuksekova on Tuesday did not have the look of a town bracing for war. Life carried on more or less routinely. Schoolboys played basketball, shoppers picked over well-stocked vegetable bins.
The region around Yuksekova, a land of sparse, ragged mountains and vast, big-sky plateaus, has long been heavily militarized and remained so Tuesday. Dozens of helicopter missions had flown overnight, residents said, and more than the usual number of checkpoints were manned by soldiers or military police, with sandbags and video cameras.
On the road that leads south from Yuksekova to the Iraqi border, an army outpost about 20 miles from the border stopped all traffic and barred journalists from traveling farther.
It was on this road that PKK rebels blew up a bridge Sunday and ambushed a Turkish army patrol, killing 12 soldiers and wounding 16 others. Eight remain unaccounted for; the PKK says it captured them, and on Tuesday a pro-Kurdish news agency released photographs purporting to show some of the men.
"That's the war zone," one of the officers at the checkpoint said, signaling an unseen point to the south over the mountains.
