Translated material
It's all about Kirkuk
Turks attack Kurds with an eye on the USA
Turkish President Abdullah Gul yesterday confirmed Ankara's "readiness and right" for a military operation against bases and militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in neighboring Iraq.In turn, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said thatthe decision to conduct a cross-border operation was made by the government on November 28 as part of the anti-terrorism law approved by parliament in mid-October. The prime minister did not say a word about the timing of the large-scale operation.
Although the PKK unites Turkish Kurds, its fighters and leaders now take refuge in the mountains in the north of neighboring Iraq. “The army has been given powers, and it will use them when it finds it necessary,” the president noted. The situation on the border is heating up, but the persecution by the Turks of Kurdish militants is so far limited and carried out mainly in Turkey.
The day before yesterday, the Turkish General Staff reported that a company of special forces tracked down and attacked “a group of 50-60 terrorists, inflicting heavy losses on them.” Then six combat helicopters and long-range artillery launched missile and bomb attacks on a PKK base in northern Iraq. However, the Turkish military did not cross the border. A source in the General Staff told the media that Kurdish militants were found “20 km from the border with Iraq,” that is, on Turkish territory. “Two terrorists have been killed,” the officer added.
“There was no Turkish invasion of northern Iraq or shelling, nor were there any casualties,” Jabbar Yawar, an intelligence spokesman for the Peshmarga, the Iraqi Kurdish Autonomous Army, announced yesterday. The US command in Iraq reported that it also has no information about Turkish military actions in the territory of the autonomy.
The Turkish General Staff, which concentrated a 150,000-strong military force in the border zone, called Saturday’s operation “targeted” - similar actions “will be carried out in the future on the basis of intelligence received.”
The PKK has been declared a terrorist organization not only in Turkey, but also in the United States and the EU. (Russia, however, did not include this organization on its blacklist.) Nevertheless, the West constantly calls on Ankara to refrain from a large-scale invasion that could destabilize the most peaceful region of Iraq, the Kurdish Autonomous Region. Last week, the Turkish and US militaries held two rounds of talks in Ankara on joining forces in countering the PKK, in particular through the exchange of intelligence information. In early November, during a visit to Washington, Prime Minister Erdogan insisted on ending the PKK’s activities in Iraq, as well as on the arrest and extradition of its leaders to Turkey. “The PKK is the enemy of Turkey, the enemy of Iraq and America,” US President George W. Bush answered the guest, agreeing only to intensify cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries.
PKK representatives in the largest cities of the Iraqi Kurdish Autonomous Region - Mosul, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah - said yesterday that Turkish aircraft in recent days have scattered not bombs in the mountains, but leaflets offering to lay down their arms and receive an amnesty. They argued that the PKK had already turned into a political party, and the non-party “people's self-defense forces” created at its proposal, which could gather up to 20 thousand bayonets under their banner, were fighting the Turks. According to Turkish estimates, the number of these units does not exceed three thousand. At the end of October, the President of the autonomy, Masoud Barzani, ordered the closure of all PKK offices in Iraqi Kurdistan. At the same time, he promised “not to extradite a single Kurd” and “to give a crushing rebuff to foreign invasion.”
Olga Zhigalina, head of the sector of Kurdish studies and regional problems of the department of the Near and Middle East of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, connected the tension on the Turkish-Iraqi border with the situation in northern Iraq. The expert told Vremya Novostey that the Turks “will continue to shoot until the Iraqi Kurds cancel or postpone the referendum they planned for December 31 on the inclusion of oil-rich Kirkuk in the Kurdish Autonomy.” According to the expert, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan “promised Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to put pressure on the Kurds until they give in.” “The plebiscite of the population of Kirkuk, the historical capital of the Kurds, is defined in Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution and was scheduled to take place in November. The Americans agree to postpone it until May 2008 at most. The final date will be determined jointly by Nouri al-Maliki, Masoud Barzani and Iraqi Kurdish President Jalal Talabani,” our interlocutor said.