Turkey is massing 40,000 troops along its border with Kurdish controlled Iraq. Iran has been shelling Kurdish villages along its border with Iraq. Turkey’s Foreign Minister, has openly declared that his country is cooperating with Iran to prevent incursions by guerillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which he claims threaten both Iran and Turkey with terrorist attacks.
The PKK is a militant organization which has long sought the creation of an independent Kurdish state encompassing Northern Iraq and those parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran in which Kurds also predominate. The PKK has been blamed for over 30,000 casualties since it first initiated its campaign of armed violence in 1984. Turkey has been concerned for some time that PKK activity has been on the rise since the US led invasion of Iraq, and has raised those concerns with the Bush administration on numerous occasions, most recently when Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice visited Ankara last week seeking help from Turkey in dealing with Iran.
More from the Scotsman.com article after the break . . .
Turkey and Iran are wary of the autonomy Iraqi Kurds have consolidated since the 2003 Iraq war and fear it might lead to more unrest among their own large Kurdish populations.
About 5,000 PKK fighters are believed to be operating out of camps in Iraq’s Kurdistan.
Turkey has voiced concern the conflict in Iraq is allowing the PKK to be more active and has asked the United States, which has more than 130,000 troops in Iraq, to do more.
Some analysts say the massing of Turkish troops on the border is partly aimed at putting pressure on Washington.
We know that Rice was seeking from the Turkish government its permission to use the airbase at Incirlik to fly sorties against Iran, if and when Bush decides to attack, a request that Turkey has, to date, rejected, claiming it wants a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, rather than a military one. However, that might change if Turkey can get action from Washington to crack down on the PKK.
The trouble is that the US isn’t really in any kind of position to demand anything from the Kurds right now. Few of our troops are based in Northern Iraq, where we have allowed the Kurds to pretty much have a free hand. Nor do we have the ability to force a confrontation with the Kurdish authorities, as our troops have more than enough to do in and around Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. Further, any confrontation between the Kurds and US forces would only increase and spread instability in Iraq. Our only option is diplomacy at this point, one which Rice stressed in her visit to Ankara:
QUESTION: Turkey has been very critical of Washington that the US is not keeping its earlier promises in fighting the PKK, which is already officially declared as terrorist by Washington. Do you plan to take a concrete step against the PKK presence in northern Iraq or is there any policy change by the US on the issue?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, the very fact that the PKK is declared as a terrorist organization in the United States means that there are certain things that the United States is obligated to do. For instance, we are obligated to do what we can to deal with their financing so that they don’t receive moneys in any way that the United States can stop it from happening.
We of course understand and are thoroughly committed to the fact that terrorism should not come from the territory of northern Iraq. And we are in a trilateral arrangement, mechanism, with the Iraqis and with Turkey to deal with the threat of the PKK. We will do everything that we can. The security situation is difficult still in the country, and there are at this point some limits on what we can do. But it is not because of a lack of commitment to dealing with the PKK, and we will do so because they are a terrorist organization and ought to be dealt with as a terrorist organization.
So, in the short term I think we can look for increasing cross-border incidents in Northern Iraq involving both Turkey and Iran. How extensive these become and what the Kurds will do in response are, as Donald Rumsfeld is fond of saying, known unknowns. That is, we know that whatever happens won’t be good, but how bad it may get is still up in the air.
Stay tuned, as they say.
