Kurdish Front
Unconfirmed Reuters report: PKK Kurds take “many” Turkish soldiers hostage. Turks, PKK clash near Iraq border, 35 dead, Bloomberg:
Turkey’s army and Kurdish militants clashed near the border with Iraq today in fighting that killed 35 people, as Turkey considered an attack on the group’s bases in Iraq’s Kurdish-controlled north.
Twenty-three members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, who had crossed into Turkey from Iraq and 12 Turkish soldiers died in battles near the Turkish village of Daglica, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) north from the Iraqi border, the Turkish armed forces said on its Web site. Sixteen soldiers were also injured in the fighting, it said.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week obtained permission from parliament to order a military incursion into Iraq’s north, after the PKK killed 28 Turkish soldiers and civilians in attacks earlier this month. About 3,500 PKK fighters use northern Iraq as a base to attack targets in Turkey, according to the Turkish government.
“As a nation we are extremely angry,” Erdogan said today in televised comments to reporters in Istanbul. “We will do whatever is necessary within the scope of the power now vested in us by parliament.”
The United States does not need two of its strongest allies in the region, the Kurds and the Turks, at war in Northern Iraq. The only good news so far is that Congress does not appear like to undercut Bush with its effort to tidy up history with an Armenian genocide vote. Iraq meanwhile, has been trying to talk the Kurds down but is now focused on expressing sovereignty:
BAGHDAD — The Iraqi parliament began debate Saturday on a resolution condemning Turkey for its recent decision to authorize strikes against Kurdish rebels in Iraq, as an estimated 15,000 Kurds from a village on the border between the two countries protested the Turkish move.
Debate on the measure, which would urge Iraq’s northern neighbor to rely on peaceful means to resolve disputes, is likely to last several days. Several party leaders in parliament voiced support for such a resolution, but some said the wording must be tempered to also condemn attacks by the Kurdish separatists and voice understanding for Turkey’s position.
On Wednesday, Turkey’s parliament voted to authorize cross-border military raids over the next year targeting fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, the main Turkish rebel group, who operate from bases in the mountains of northern Iraq. The vote came after a recent PKK attack killed 13 Turkish soldiers.
Many Iraqi representatives, including in the northern region of Kurdistan, do not support the rebel group and are sympathetic to Turkey’s position. But Iraqis are also keen to demonstrate their sovereignty, particularly as the U.S. continues its military involvement in their country. Another factor at work are the concerns of Iraqi Kurds and their supporters, who fear the Turkish saber-rattling is a pretext for encroaching on Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region bordering Turkey.
“They have Kurdophobia,” said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Kurdistan Alliance bloc in parliament. “They are afraid of anything Kurdish.”
The United States, trying to relieve tensions between two allies, has been pressuring Iraq to launch an offensive against the PKK. But with Iraq’s fledgling security forces stretched thin trying to keep order in the country’s central region, the chance of a major Iraqi offensive in the near future is slim, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said.
I would hope the United States is also leaning very heavily on its staunchly pro-American Iraqi Kurdish pals, who so effectively police their own territory, to keep the PKK from creating chaos and war in a new arena at a time when Iraq is otherwise on the upswing.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:06 am on Sunday, October 21, 2007
6 Responses to “Kurdish Front”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
October 21st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
This is not good news, and puts the U.S. in a bad spot. I know the PKK has been at it for a long time, but I wonder how much of this latest involves the calculation that it puts us in a bad spot.
October 21st, 2007 at 3:35 pm
The PKK has split in recent years and the military branch has lost support among Kurds, this is not good news for us, for Turkey or for the Kurds themselves.
I did read in my travels that the Turks might be more willing to attempt diplomacy than their rhetoric would lead us to believe. Let’s hope.
October 21st, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Thank you congress, you really fired things up. Now you don’t have to pass the resolution, the desired result has been achieved.
It’s too bad that there’s no way to put you on trial for incompetence.
October 21st, 2007 at 11:34 pm
If Iraq is a sovereign state over the area the PKK is operating in then it must act as such and put down the PKK. Under International Law the Turks have every right to cross over and take matters into their own hands if the owning state refuses or is unable to suppress acts of war against the Turks from their territory. That’s actual IL, a matter of contracts and custom, not the vaporware law of law school theorists and UN and EU bureaucrats.
The Turks have been our allies for almost sixty years. I have grave doubts about how much longer that will last with the upsurge of Islamism in Turkey, but we should not push them away by failing to help against the PKK. The latter serves our enemies and attacks our ally. The Turkish position is unassailable under International Law. This should be a no-brainer even for Foggy Botton. Iraq’s Kurds need to clean up their act and suppress the PKK, PDQ.
October 21st, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Michael Lonie says: “Under International Law the Turks have every right to cross over and take matters into their own hands if the owning state refuses or is unable to suppress acts of war against the Turks from their territory.”
Doesn’t the same thing hold true re Iran’s incursions into Iraq?
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:14 am
SD@11:56, yup!