 With the invasion of Iraq in 2003, much of the arms of the Iraqi Army fell into the hands of the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga militias.The Peshmerga became the de facto army of Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkish sources claim many of its weapons found their way into the hands of other Kurdish groups such as the PKK and the PJAK (a PKK offshoot which operates in Iranian Kurdistan).This has been the pretext for numerous Turkish attacks on the Kurdistan region of Iraq.