Turkey Sends Soldiers Into N. Iraq

Offensive Against Kurdish Separatists Alarms Baghdad

By Joshua Partlow and Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 23, 2008; A11

DAHUK, Iraq, Feb. 22 -- After months of sporadic shelling targeting the mountain hideouts of Kurdish guerrilla fighters, Turkey sent tanks and ground troops into northern Iraq on Thursday afternoon in an incursion that escalated the tension between the neighboring countries.

The incursion marked the first time since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that Turkish soldiers in large numbers have crossed onto Iraqi soil. The offensive alarmed Iraqi officials, who have condemned violence by the separatist Kurdish guerrillas in the past but do not want to see a large-scale Turkish invasion.

"This has been a serious escalation," Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said in an interview. "We hope that this will end as soon as possible for fear of escalation or any minor mistakes that would lead to a wider problem."

After hours of bombing and shelling by Turkish artillery and warplanes, Turkish soldiers crossed via the Habur mountain pass after dusk Thursday into a sparsely populated corner of northern Iraq that the separatist rebel group, known as the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, has used as a refuge and a base for attacks inside Turkey. The number of Turkish troops in Iraq remained unclear Friday, but U.S. and Iraqi officials estimated it at 500 to 1,000. Turkish television reported that the number was as high as 10,000.

Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said he was unaware whether Turkish soldiers had fought any battles in Iraq.

"I don't know how far they have advanced or precisely how deep they are going to go," he said. "They said they will work to avoid collateral damage against infrastructure and civilians. We all agree that they are going after a terrorist group."

But Ahmed Denize, a member of the PKK, said that small teams of guerrillas had fought the Turkish soldiers throughout the day Friday. Turkish soldiers destroyed three bridges during their movement into Iraq, he said. He also said PKK fighters had killed about 20 Turkish soldiers, but that claim could not be verified.

"We had information that they are coming, so we spread out in small groups and opened fire on them," he said. "The fight is still going on."

The Turkish military reported that 24 members of the PKK were killed, along with five Turkish soldiers, according to the semiofficial Anatolia news agency.

The soldiers of northern Iraq's Kurdish regional government were on high alert Friday, officials said. Kurdish news agencies reported that the soldiers, known as the pesh merga, were dispatched from the Kurdish capital of Irbil to the northern city of Dahuk. In mountain towns along the way such as Sarsank and Anishka, the camouflaged soldiers in maroon berets were abundant, filling fleets of white pickup trucks at gas stations, sitting in groups along the side of the road or taking photographs of themselves overlooking the vast mountain valleys.

At a pesh merga base in Skren, commanders declined to discuss the troop movements but confirmed that the soldiers in the streets were new arrivals.

The conflict between the PKK and Turkey dates back decades and has claimed thousands of lives. The Kurdish guerrillas want more rights for the large Kurdish population in Turkey and have also, at times, advocated an independent Kurdish state in the region. The smoldering tensions flared up in October when Kurdish rebels killed 12 Turkish soldiers near Turkey's border with northern Iraq. Turkish politicians threatened an invasion and have said they will do what is necessary to protect their people from rebel attacks. Throughout the fall and winter, Turkey bombed PKK positions along the border but until Thursday had stopped short of crossing into Iraqi territory.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul told reporters in Ankara, the capital, that the troops were making every effort to avoid civilian casualties. "We have always welcomed and extended a helping hand to the Iraqi people during their difficult times, and they are friends and family of Turkey," he said.

Turkey has long maintained several small military bases in northern Iraq. As Turkey was bombarding Iraqi territory Thursday, Turkish tanks rolled out of one of their bases but were blocked by the pesh merga, according to Iraqi officials. After a tense standoff, both sides retreated.

The incident reflects the fine line the Kurdistan Regional Government is walking in dealing with Turkey's efforts against the rebel group. Its public stance in recent months has been that its forces will try to isolate and weaken the PKK but that they do not have the capability to drive out the guerrillas, who live in rugged terrain with steep, rocky roads. The pesh merga has blocked journalists' access to PKK territory, and Iraqi officials say they have also made it more difficult for the guerrillas to move throughout northern Iraq.

By refusing to confront the PKK, the Kurdish regional government avoids the potentially incendiary step of starting an intra-Kurdish battle within Iraq. At the same time, the PKK has very little political clout in Iraq and has been publicly condemned by all sides.

"We have not been a threat, and we do not pose a threat to Turkey," said Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the Kurdish government's foreign relations department. "We've done what we can in order to help the situation. We care about this. We understand that this is a problem. But this is not the right approach to solve it. It only brings more destruction and brings more problems."

The Bush administration has been an active partner in Turkey's fight against the Kurdish rebels. Turkey has grown more aggressive since President Bush called the PKK a common enemy of Turkey, Iraq and the United States recently. The U.S. military has been sharing intelligence to help target rebel positions and is kept informed of Turkey's military movements.

Gul called Bush early Thursday to tell him of the incursion, according to Turkey's military. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged Turkey to keep the operation short and "keep in mind that while the terrorists need, obviously, to be stopped from doing what they're doing, that there really can't be a destabilization of the region."

"This is something that we were aware of in advance, and, as you know, the U.S. agrees with Turkey that the PKK is a terrorist organization and is an enemy of Turkey, Iraq and the United States," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters.

Kurdish officials said they have lived with the U.S.-sanctioned bombing campaign against the rebels but feel the incursion is a violation of their sovereignty; they have also said they will defend their territory, if necessary. Bakir, the Kurdish foreign relations official, said the Americans should halt the Turkish advance.

"We believe that they have a responsibility to stop this incursion, which is not in anybody's interest," he said.

Correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer in Cairo, special correspondent Dlovan Brwari in Dahuk and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.

The Next Battle in Iraq?

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, July 8, 2007; B07

The relative stability and prosperity of Iraqi Kurdistan provide the only bright spots of redemption for President Bush in the bloody anarchy that Iraq has become under a mismanaged occupation. Permanently securing the Kurdish minority from Baghdad's genocidal impulses and acts would be a historic accomplishment.

But the growing likelihood of Turkish military strikes into Iraq's northern region threatens to erase that last positive legacy of the American invasion -- and to undermine prospects for a major U.S. redeployment out of Iraq's chaotic cities to bases in the north in the near future. Eagerly sought by the Kurds, such redeployment is strongly opposed by Ankara, which listens to an urgently ticking electoral clock.

Managing Turkey's legitimate grievances against its own Kurdish rebels who take sanctuary among their Iraqi kin requires both agility and firmness from Washington. Thus far, the administration has shown neither quality in dealing with a devastated Iraq and its grasping neighbors. There is no better time than a moment of political extremis to change habits.

American failure in transforming Iraq has many causes. None is more important than Bush's inability to set clear, achievable priorities and to stick to them when they collide with the vested interests of Iraq's neighbors and of significant parts of the U.S. bureaucracy.

Bush has not followed his own counsel to the American people. Despite his rhetoric, he has not treated Iraq as the defining struggle of our time, one that requires sustained sacrifice and clarity of purpose. He has hopped from goal to goal and from faction to faction in the U.S. government, in Iraq and in the region, rather than pursue the steady, determined course that was -- and still is -- needed.

Consider his deferring to Sunni Arab governments rather than putting effective pressure on them to back U.S. efforts in Iraq. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have both gone to the region and urged Saudi Arabia's rulers to work with Nouri al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister of the "national unity" Iraqi government that the administration helped bring to power last year.

"No," was the blunt answer from the Saudis, who let it be known they do not trust Maliki because they see him as an agent of Iran's Shiite ayatollahs. "Okay," perhaps accompanied by a shrug, seems to have been the considered bottom-line U.S. response.

Similarly, the administration has not conveyed a message that is clear and consistent enough to deter Turkey's politicians from issuing increasingly strident threats to invade Iraqi Kurdistan -- or to keep Turkish generals from massing forces on the border, as they have in recent weeks.

This is partly about politics: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party face a pitched battle for control of parliament in elections set for July 22. They must convincingly trounce the far-right Nationalist Movement Party to secure the commanding majority they need to enact far-reaching changes to the constitution. But NMP accusations that Erdogan is weak on Kurdish terrorism are boosting the right-wingers in the polls as time runs out.

But it is also about strategy: The generals, who compete with the politicians for influence in Turkish affairs, do not want a strong, U.S.-protected Kurdistan on their border. And they are upset over what they view as unkept promises from Washington to curb the small but murderous Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) guerrilla force that operates from Iraqi territory, thereby relieving pressure on Ankara to intervene.

Neither the Pentagon nor the CIA appears to have stepped up to the mission. This inaction feeds Turkish suspicions that hidden anti-Iranian agendas and alliances among U.S., Saudi, Jordanian and other intelligence services have more influence over American priorities than do commitments from Bush or his senior aides.

A month ago, a consensus among trained observers and diplomats held that the Turks were unlikely to intervene despite their threats. That opinion is changing as disillusionment and electoral desperation take hold in Ankara. Moreover, predictions that any intervention would be limited to airstrikes and mopping-up operations by Turkish special forces at PKK sites are giving way to fears of a much larger operation that could be aimed at forestalling Kurdish control over the disputed Kirkuk region. Rice telephoned Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul on Friday to try to head off intervention but received no firm assurance.

A Turkish invasion that turns Kurdistan's relative calm into chaos and bloodshed would be the nail in the coffin for Bush's legacy in Iraq and for U.S. public support for the American presence there. Making sure this does not happen should be Priority One for Bush and for everyone working for him in the weeks ahead.

Bomb Levels Section of Iraqi Village, Killing 105

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ALI ADEEB

BAGHDAD, July 7 — A suicide truck bomber killed at least 105 people in a single blast north of Baghdad on Saturday, police officials said, leading to further fears that insurgents who fled intense military operations in Baghdad and Diyala are turning to targets away from the American troop buildup.

The explosives-laden truck demolished dozens of fragile clay-built houses and shops in Amerli, a village of poor Shiite Turkmen about 70 miles north of Baquba, the largest city in Diyala. The Iraqi police said that in addition to the dead, at least 240 people were wounded. It was one of the deadliest single attacks of the war.

Zain al-Abadeen Abdul Hussein, a shop owner burned on his right arm and left leg, said the blast sent debris soaring into the air and set people on fire. “I saw children from my neighborhood burning,” he said.

The American military also reported Saturday the deaths of nine soldiers and marines on Thursday and Friday, eight killed during combat or from roadside bombs. The fatalities brought the military’s death toll to 23 for the first week of July, nearly five months since the beginning of the troop increase.

The attack in Amerli, and a similar blast hours earlier in a village not far away that killed 17 people and wounded six, showed the insurgents’ ability to single out defenseless civilians well outside Baghdad and the surrounding region, where five new American combat brigades arrived this year.

Witnesses in Amerli described a horrific scene of people running while on fire, and others shrieking for rescuers to pull them from beneath the scores of buildings turned into rubble by the blast.

Most of the dead were inside 40 homes and 20 shops destroyed in the attack, said Maj. Nawzad Abdullah of the Iraqi police. Some of the wounded were rushed to hospitals in Tuz Khurmato, about 15 miles away, but that city’s emergency services were overwhelmed, so other victims had to be sent much farther, to Kirkuk and Sulaimaniya.

Major Abdullah said about two-thirds of the dead were buried by their families without being taken to the morgue or hospital, because relatives were terrified that the roads were too dangerous and could be vulnerable to more bombings. By late Saturday afternoon, the Iraqi police estimated that 150 people had been released from the hospitals.

One survivor, Sukaina Abdullah, a 40-year-old housewife with burns on her legs and other wounds, said at a hospital in Kirkuk that she did not know whether her family was alive.

“I don’t know the fate of my husband and son,” Ms. Abdullah said. “Our house collapsed on us. The same thing happened to relatives and other people in our neighborhood. A lot of houses collapsed.”

Before thousands of American troops swept through Baquba last month, a senior American commander estimated that 300 to 500 insurgents were hunkered down in the part of the city that American forces were poised to invade; after the operation, the same officer said at least half had escaped or eluded capture.

The attack in Amerli came 12 hours after a suicide car bomber sped into a bustling market on Friday night in Zarkush, a Shiite-dominated farming district 40 miles northeast of Baquba, according to the local police.

No groups claimed immediate responsibility for the two blasts, but both were suicide attacks against scores of Shiite civilians, a hallmark of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other extremist Sunni groups.

The attacks followed several deadly days for American troops. Two soldiers were killed and two wounded south of Baghdad on Friday by an improvised bomb, the military said. Another died Friday in an undisclosed location from a “non-battle-related cause.”

Another improvised bomb on Friday killed two other soldiers and wounded three more on combat patrol in eastern Baghdad. In a separate attack, a particularly deadly type of roadside bomb that can pierce thick armor killed a soldier in southeastern Baghdad.

On Saturday, the military also reported the deaths of three servicemen in combat on Thursday: two marines in Anbar, and a soldier in western Baghdad.

Two British troops also died in the southern city of Basra, one on Friday in what British officials said was a noncombat accident, and another on Saturday, killed by an improvised bomb.

A suicide car bomber killed four Iraqi Army soldiers and wounded another at a checkpoint in the eastern part of the capital, an Interior Ministry official said. Fourteen unidentified bodies were also found throughout the city, the official said.

Iranian diplomats on Saturday were granted their first visit to five Iranians who had been detained by American forces in January in Erbil. The visit, at an American military detention facility, lasted for several hours, said Philip Reeker, a spokesman for the American Embassy in Baghdad.

Also on Saturday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for the organization led by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to confront rogue and violent members and “make conclusive and clear decisions, so as not to be held responsible for those using its name in killings, terrorism and other unlawful actions.”

Reporting was contributed by Alissa J. Rubin, Stephen Farrell and Qais Mizher from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Kirkuk and Diyala.

150 killed by Iraq suicide truck bomb

The blast targeting ethnic Turkmans at a market in a northern Iraqi village injures 250. A car bomb in Diyala province kills 22 Shiite Kurds. Two U.S. soldiers die in Baghdad explosion.
By Ned Parker
Times Staff Writer

11:01 AM PDT, July 7, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A suicide truck bomb ripped a village market in a northern Iraq today, killing 150 people and wounding 250, said Col. Abbas Mohammed Amin, the police chief of Tuz Khurmatu.

The blast targeted the region's ethnic Turkman population on a weekend when a car bomb also killed 22 Shiite Kurds in neighboring Diyala province on the Iranian border. The two areas are fraught with tensions as Iraq's religious and ethnic groups compete for power.

The truck bomb today struck an outdoor market in Amerli, about 12 miles south of the city of Tuz Khurmatu. Shops and homes were destroyed, and people were buried under the debris, police said.

Kurds are lobbying to make Tuz Khurmatu part of Kurdistan through a provision of the Iraqi constitution that calls for the settling of the status of territories such as the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, where Saddam Hussein settled Arabs and displaced Kurds in the 1970s and 1980s.

Meanwhile, a bomb blast killed two U.S. soldiers on a foot patrol in Baghdad on Friday, the military announced, while a British soldier died during an operation in the southern port of Basra. A soldier from Fiji died in a non-combat related incident, the British military said, but no further information was available.

On the political front, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki told reporters that radical cleric Muqtada Sadr's movement needed to confront wayward members of its Mahdi Army militia who are committing acts of violence.

"I call upon the brothers of the Sadr movement to take clear and decisive decisions in order not to bear the responsibility of those using its name in killing, terrorism and outlaw acts everywhere," Maliki said.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari announced that officials from the Iranian Embassy had visited the five Iranian nationals who were detained by the U.S. military in January. U.S. officials have accused the men of belonging to Iran's Al Quds Force, the covert branch of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard. However, Iran insists the men are diplomats.

ned.parker@latimes.com

Times staff writers Wail Alhafith, Saif Rasheed and Raheem Salman contributed to this report.