TURKEY’S MILITARY MAY STAGE MORE CROSS-BORDER OPERATIONS INTO NORTHERN IRAQ

PanARMENIAN.Net
20.12.2007 18:29 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Turkey’s military may stage more cross-border
operations into northern Iraq to hunt down separatist Kurdish rebels,
Turkey’s parliament speaker said Thursday, as the justice minister
again urged the rebels to surrender.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan thanked the Turkish armed forces,
calling their operations successful, and said Turkey was at an
important stage of its fight against the rebels of the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party, or PKK, who are based in northern Iraq.

Turkey, which has massed thousands of troops along the border,
sent hundreds of them across into the mountains of northern Iraq on
Tuesday. It said it inflicted heavy losses on Turkish Kurd rebels
in a small-scale incursion that lasted about 15 hours – and in air
strikes by as many as 50 fighter jets on suspected rebel hideouts
two days earlier.

"The Turkish armed forces will carry on with these operations whenever
they are needed," parliament speaker Koksal Toptan said Thursday.

Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin said, "I hope the members of the
terrorist group understand that they cannot achieve their aim by
fighting the security forces."

"They should come and give themselves up to the merciful hands of the
state. They should rejoin their mothers, their fathers and relatives
and live in peace as a citizen of this country," he said.

The government has said it plans to expand an amnesty law that pardons
rebels who leave the PKK voluntarily and who have not been engaged
in fighting, the IHT reports.