The funeral images on Turkish television are a familiar ritual. A line of plywood coffins draped in large Turkish flags stands in the courtyard of a school or government building; inside are the bodies of soldiers killed in the latest attack by Kurdish separatists. Behind the coffins a line of smart young soldiers standing at attention, a gaggle of hysterical mothers being restrained by male relatives and, if the crop of tragedy is big enough, a few senior generals and politicians. Today, the Turkish military buried 13 men killed in a PKK ambush near Sirnak, by the Iraqi border. Their death brings the toll to 97 soldiers killed this year alone.

Not surprisingly, calls for action from the media and opposition are overwhelming – and most center on the idea of raiding PKK camps in North Iraq, where around 4500 PKK fighters are thought to be holed up. The Baghdad government – and particularly the Iraqi Kurds who control the foreign ministry - has strongly rejected the idea of sanctioning any cross-border operations by Turkey. Its not hard to see why. The Iraqi Kurds need Ankara’s cooperation to continue their trade with Turkey, which is the lifeblood of their landlocked region. And though the Iraqi Kurds have had their differences with the PKK, the idea of siding with the Turks, a historical enemy, against fellow-Kurds is unthinkable. So Turkey’s government is between a rock and a hard place. Whacking the PKK is the easy option, providing the Turkish public with the quick satisfaction of revenge. But that’s exactly what the PKK wants Ankara to do. They’ve lost the war for a separate Turkish Kurdistan, and beggared their people for a generation in the process. There’s little support for the PKK’s twisted, Marxist version of nationalism among most Kurds – who just want basic rights and prosperity, not the eternal revolutionary struggle envisaged by the PKK. So what the dying PKK needs to revive its fortunes and its credibility is an aggressive raid by the Turks, which will create a new crop of martyrs and force even their old enemies, the Iraqi Kurdish administration, to back them.

Professional revolutionaries thrive on conflict. What they hate most is compromise of the sort forced on Turkey by the European Union, which made Ankara give Kurds cultural rights and liberalize free speech laws. A new escalation of violence – if Ankara succumbs to the provocation - would undo all those years of reform in a stroke by stoking knee-jerk nationalism, and a new spiral of violence. The key to asymmetric warfare is provoking your stronger opponent into self-defeating acts of over-reaction. That is precisely what the PKK is attempting to do. Perhaps the government will find the wisdom to resist the temptation to charge in and avenge its dead.