eFluxMedia
Oct 14 2007
Turkish Artillery Opens Fire on Kurdish Border Villages
by Diane Smith 13:16, October 14th 2007
After the US congressional committee cataloged the First World War
massacre of Armenians in what was then the Ottoman Empire as
genocide, there wasn’t sure how much influence the top US envoys sent
on Saturday would have on Ankara. Their mission, besides talking
about the genocide resolution, was to convince the Turkish
authorities to reconsider their plans of a military incursion in the
autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
However, over night, the Turkish army hit the villages close to its
country’s border with Iraq using heavy artillery. If the abandoning
of the next month’s visit to the US by the Turkish Trade Minister
Kursad Tuzman wasn’t convincing enough, the shelling of the villages
suspected of sheltering the members of the Kurdish Workers’ Party
(PKK) rebel group surely showed how dissatisfied Ankara is about the
Wednesday resolution passed by the US congressional committee, in
which the mass killings of Armenian people during the First World War
were labeled as genocide.
There were no human losses reported in last night’s offensive which
targeted the Nasdour area, a part of the mountainous Matin region,
the witnesses cited by independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI)
said.
The killing of at least two dozens Turkish soldiers and civilians
after rebel Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) attacks, were accompanied by
public outrage that increased the pressure on the Turkish government
to launch a military operation against the PKK camps.
After Turkey announced its intentions of launching a military
incursion into northern Iraq in order to destroy PKK camps, Kurdish
authorities slammed the caveat and with it a security agreement that
Baghdad’s government sealed last month with Ankara.
On Saturday, Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman urged Baghdad to cancel
the security agreement. Othman said the Kurdistani Alliance, which
has 53 seats in Iraq’s Council of Representatives, will request a
meeting with Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani after the Muslim
festival of Eid al-Fitr in order to talk about the security agreement
he signed with Ankara.
However, the Interior Ministry spokesman Abdel-Karim Khalaf answered
that the Iraqi central government "is alone responsible for signing
foreign agreements," thus it doesn’t need to consult with `regional
administrations.’
"The centralized government is solely responsible for protecting the
international Iraqi borders. The regional government is part of the
state, and so they should not be concerned with foreign pacts,"
Khalaf told VOI.
The above mentioned security agreement was signed on September 28 by
Baghdad and Ankara and it stipulates that Iraq will cooperate with
Turkish authorities in hunting down PKK rebels close to its borders.
After some reports Iraq agreed to cooperate, but refused to grant an
absolute right to Turkish troops to cross the border in order to
annihilate the PKK camps. Other accounts said that Turkey was given
the right to chase the rebels, although the Iraqi government
officials strongly denied such a thing.
Despite the statement issued by government spokesman Ali al-Dabagh
which said that Iraq would never allow Turkish troops into its
territories, Turkey was already massing troops along the Iraqi border
on Saturday.
"Any Turkish attacks will be met with wide resistance from the
(Kurdish) Peshmerga and the people," Kurdish government leader Qader
Aziz said before the shelling.
But a unilateral Kurdish response is doubtful, especially after
Othman said on Saturday that a reaction to any Turkish incursion
would by coordinated with the central government as well as the US
forces in Iraq.
The PKK, on the other hand, said on Saturday they do not intend to
leave the region if the Turks attack and also that their members do
not launch any military strikes from that region.
"We have militants in Turkey who carry out the attacks. This is not
new to Turks," Abdel-Rahman Chaderchi, who is in charge of the PKK’s
foreign relations, told VOI.
He also added that Turkey hides behind the alleged hunt for PKK
rebels its real intentions of eroding the rights of the Iraqi Kurds
in the region
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