Godlike Productions - News: Turkish government to seek go-ahead for Iraq incursion

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Turkish government to seek go-ahead for Iraq incursion

Forbes

2007-10-15

ANKARA (Thomson Financial) - The Turkish government met today to prepare a motion seeking parliamentary approval for a military incursion into neighbouring Iraq to crack down on Kurdish rebel bases there.

'The ministers will discuss the ... motion (which) will be sent to parliament once it is signed by all the ministers,' a government official told AFP.

The cabinet is expected to seek a one-year authorisation for a military operation in northern Iraq, where an estimated 3,500 rebels of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) are based.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said international pressure would not deter Ankara from sending troops into northern Iraq, adding that 'the cost has already been calculated.'

The United States has repeatedly urged Turkey against such action.

Ankara says it has no other option because neither Washington nor Baghdad are helping end the safe haven the PKK enjoys in northern Iraq.

Ties between the two NATO allies took a fresh blow last week when the US House Foreign Affairs Committee endorsed a bill branding the Ottoman massacres of Armenians during World War I as genocide.

The army said at the weekend that it had shelled Iraqi territory after PKK rebels attacked a Turkish military outpost with rockets and gunfire from across the border.

Mounting violence by the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Turkey and much of the international community, has turned up pressure on Erdogan for tougher measures against the rebels.

He hinted last week, however, that military action is unlikely to be immediate.

'It does not mean that everything will happen once we have the authorisation,' he said. 'We want to have the authorisation in hand so we can decide swiftly when it becomes necessary.'

Ankara says the PKK enjoys free movement in northern Iraq and obtains weapons and explosives there for attacks inside Turkey.

It has accused the Iraqi Kurds, who run the region, of tolerating and even supporting the rebels.

Washington is also under fire for what Ankara considers to be its failure to help curb the PKK, which the United States also lists as a terrorist group.

Turkish criticism of Washington increased recently after it emerged that US weapons given to Iraq had ended up in PKK hands.

Turkey and Iraq signed an accord last month to combat the PKK but failed to agree on a clause allowing Turkish troops to engage in 'hot pursuit' -- as they did regularly in the 1990s -- against rebels fleeing into Iraqi territory.

Observers here also doubt that the embattled Baghdad government, which has virtually no authority in northern Iraq, can cajole the Iraqi Kurds into action against the PKK.

The PKK has waged a bloody campaign for Kurdish self-rule in southeast Turkey since 1984 in a conflict that has claimed more than 37,000 lives.

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