The thousands of ramshackle oil lorries that used to rumble along 24 hours a day stand idle.

Bad-tempered soldiers stop cars three times on the approach to the town.

And Silopi itself has been transformed from a quiet border town, nine miles from Iraq, into the launch pad for one of Turkey’s riskiest military adventures.

There are soldiers every few hundred yards. On the edge of town is the final checkpoint, past which no outsider can go, and beyond here a powerful army has gathered.

Lorries of commandos head past the checkpoint, towards tanks and artillery.

Exact numbers are hard to determine, but Turkish security sources say that 10,000 commandos are in position close to the border, with 50,000 regular troops on standby across the southeast region.

Turkey’s intentions are clear: to enter northern Iraq in force within hours of the start of war.

And for days the rest of the world has been pleading with it to change its mind.

For the reason for this sinister build-up is the same one that brought death and misery to this region throughout the 1990s: the Kurdish problem.

Denied their own nation after the First World War, the Kurdish people found themselves divided between six nations, including Turkey and northern Iraq. For a decade the Turkish Army fought Kurdish rebels until the arrest of Abdullah Ocalan, the guerrilla leader, brought a ceasefire in 1999.

Now even that fragile stability has begun to crumble.

Turkey is afraid that, once liberated, the Kurds of northern Iraq will declare an independent state, inspiring an upsurge of Kurdish nationalism within Turkey itself.

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