Turkey threatens to attack Kurdish separatists in Iraq
Despite U.S. pleas for restraint, government will ask parliament to
approve the operation.
Los Angeles Times
By Yesim Borg
Special to The Times
October 16, 2007
ISTANBUL, TURKEY – The Turkish government Monday said it would seek
parliamentary approval this week to launch a major military operation
into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish separatists based there, after
days of cross-border shelling of suspected rebel positions.
The threatened action comes despite pleas from Washington and Baghdad
that Turkey refrain from an incursion into Iraq that could destabilize
an already volatile part of the world.
Government spokesman Cemil Cicek said that although Turkey respected
Iraq’s sovereignty, it had to act against Kurdish separatists who have
stepped up their deadly attacks on Turkish troops in recent weeks.
Several thousand rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, are
believed holed up in the mountains of northern Iraq.
"The reality that everyone knows is that this terrorist organization,
which has bases in the north of Iraq, is attacking the territorial
integrity of Turkey and its citizens," Cicek told a news conference in
Ankara, the Turkish capital.
He was speaking after the Cabinet approved a motion seeking yearlong
permission to send troops into Iraq. The motion is to go before
parliament Wednesday, and is expected to be approved.
Analysts caution, however, that approval of the request does not mean
an invasion will be launched immediately.
The motion gives Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a bargaining chip
as he seeks to quell rebel attacks and placate an army chomping at the
bit to attack.
Turkish governments were granted similar carte blanche twice in recent
years but did not act on them.
Turkey has been shelling targets in northern Iraq in recent days,
including populated villages, according to Iraqi, Kurdish and Turkish
sources. Shelling continued Sunday night in the hamlet of Kani Masi in
the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Agence France-Presse
reported.
The Bush administration, fearful that Turkish military action in
northern Iraq would inflame the single relatively peaceful part of
that country, has dispatched a string of envoys to Ankara to urge
restraint.
But Washington lost much of its power of persuasion in Turkey last
week, when a U.S. House of Representatives committee voted to
recognize as genocide the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Armenians
at the hands of Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago.
The resolution angered Turkish officials, who maintain that the mass
slaughter of Armenians should be viewed in the context of world war
and judged by historians, not politicians.
Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Rome contributed to this report.
Source: g-turkey16oct16,1,1069584.story?ctrack=1&cset= true