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roachboy · 10-20-2007, 08:11 AM

things are becoming curiouser and curiouser.

Quote:

Turkey Expects U.S. to Act Against Kurds

Saturday October 20, 2007 3:46 PM

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) - Turkey expects the U.S. to act against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq but will take its own measures if it sees no results in the fight, the prime minister said.

In northern Iraq Saturday, thousands of Kurds packed the streets of a border city to protest a threatened Turkish incursion and to warn they would defend their territory.

Turkey has threatened to cross the Iraqi border to try to wipe out Kurdish rebel bases, arguing it has the right to fight terrorism. The United States and Iraq oppose such unilateral action, fearing it could destabilize northern Iraq, the most stable part of the country.

``We have expectations mainly from the U.S. more than Iraq. We want the coalition forces - mainly the U.S.- to take a step here,'' Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview with the private Kanal 24 TV channel late Friday.

``Our demands from them are known and we will see what happens in time,'' Erdogan said. ``We will put into action our own road map if we do not get the results we want.''

Rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, operate from bases in the mountains of northern Iraq and periodically cross the border to stage attacks in their war for autonomy for Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast. More than 30,000 people have died in the conflict that began in 1984.

The Turkish government secured an authorization from parliament Wednesday to launch a military campaign into Iraq to stamp out the rebels. Turkish leaders have said publicly that they would prefer a solution to the guerrilla problem that avoids a cross-border offensive, but Erdogan has warned that Turkey will take whatever steps it must to defeat the PKK.

Public anger is high in Turkey over a recent spate of guerrilla attacks in the southeast as well as a perception that the United States has failed to back Turkey in its fight with the PKK, even though Washington lists the movement as a terrorist group.

Erdogan said he hoped to reach a consensus with Washington regarding a possible military campaign into northern Iraq during his trip to the U.S. next month.

``We want to get a result especially about this during my meetings on Nov. 5,'' Erdogan said. During the visit, Erdogan is to meet U.S. officials including President Bush.

Protesters in the northern Iraqi city of Zakho accused Turkey of trying to foment unrest in the relatively peaceful autonomous region in northern Iraq.

The demonstrators waved the flag of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region - a yellow sun against red, white and green stripes. They held up banners reading: ``No, no to the Turkish military incursion. Yes, yes to peace and security,'' and ``We will be a shield to defend our cities.''

Hussein Khalid, the mayor of Zakho, some 300 miles northwest of Baghdad, estimated the crowd at about 15,000 people.

``This demonstration represents the anger of the Kurdish community toward the green light that was given to Turkish government by the parliament to invade Kurdistan,'' Khalid said in a telephone interview from another Kurdish city, Sulaimaniyah.

The protesters called on Turkey not to launch cross-border attacks.

``Our peaceful life here is threatened ... as war will bring us only problems and humanitarian crisis,'' said Jelveen Rikani, a 28-year-old government employee among the demonstrators. Turkey wants to turn the Kurdistan region into an unsecured and restive area just like the other parts of Iraq that are mired in chaos and blood.''

There were similar protests in Irbil and another border city Dahuk earlier this week, but Saturday appeared to be the largest demonstration since the Turkish parliament's vote on Wednesday.

Turkish leaders have repeatedly said a military operation - if it is ever launched - would target only the PKK camps in scattered in northern Iraq.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlates...011303,00.html

but they arent exactly waiting around:

Quote:

Iraqis who fled homes in fear face new terror as Turkey targets PKK rebels

Refugees from across the country found peace in the Kurdish north, but are now threatened by shelling and cross-border raids

Michael Howard in Anishky, northern Iraq
Saturday October 20, 2007
The Guardian

When Youssef Toma and his family fled their home in Baghdad's perilous Dora neighbourhood and found refuge in the peaks and valleys of Kurdistan, they assumed their fear had been left behind with their furniture.

With the help of local authorities, Mr Toma, a former manager of an insurance company, had spent the last year building a new house, and life, in Anishky, a village nestling at the foot of the Matin mountains in the bucolic Sabna valley, 13 miles from the Turkish border.

Mr Toma, a deacon in the Assyrian church, and his family soon became active members of the neighbourhood congregation. He took special pride in developing his garden. Standing by a healthy crop of tomatoes this week, he gestured with his trowel at the perimeter walls of a palace Saddam Hussein built for his wife Sajida in the late 70s - a reminder, he said, that the beauty of the region was not just prized by locals.

Last weekend, however, Mr Toma's rural idyll was brutally disrupted. The dread he felt in Baghdad returned. For about 45 terrifying minutes, a barrage of Turkish artillery shells rained down from the clear night sky upon Anishky.

Turkish troops gathered across the border had supposedly been aiming at rebel bases of the Kurdistan Workers party or PKK, believed to be hiding high up in the mountains. They missed.

"Our house was shaking. I told my family it was thunder," said Mr Toma, as he looked at a blackened patch of mountainside about 100 metres behind his house, where a shell had fallen. "But I have lived in Baghdad for 40 years, so I know the sound of bombs. There were 22 of them. We escaped the Islamic terrorists, and now we are terrorised by the Turks. Where else can we run?"

Anishky was not the only village shelled this week. According to Bishop Shlimon in the nearby town of Sersing, at least six other villages in the area, many inhabited by Christian refugees from Baghdad, were affected.

"The bombardment lasted for more than four hours, striking farmlands, killing livestock and destroying orchards and roads used by villagers," he said. "It is a miracle no one was killed."

In the provincial capital of Dohuk, the deputy governor, Gorgees Shlaymoon Kaaee, also a Christian, said that night the area was hit by at least 250 shells. "Our villages have been here for centuries. We have nothing to do with PKK. Yet we are being punished all the same."

The shelling came as the Turkish parliament prepared to sanction cross-border attacks to root out guerrillas from the PKK, which has fought a bloody campaign for Kurdish rights against Turkish forces in the country's heavily Kurdish south-east since 1984. Turkey says 30 soldiers and civilians have been killed in PKK attacks since late September.

Domestic pressure

Under huge domestic pressure to take action, Ankara has deployed about 60,000 troops on its side of the border with Iraq, and has demanded that Iraq's Kurdish leaders, whom it accuses of aiding the PKK, cooperate with Baghdad in eradicating the rebel bases and extraditing PKK leaders. Turkey also accuses the US and the government in Baghdad of not doing enough to crack down on the rebels in Iraqi territory.

Though the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said this week an invasion of northern Iraq was not imminent, Turkish leaders say they reserve the right to protect the country against the rebels it claims are launching attacks from Iraq. The decision was criticised by the international community, who fear an attack would destabilise Iraqi Kurdistan, the country's most secure region. Iraq's Kurdish leaders have urged dialogue and peace.

Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, himself a Kurd, this week demanded the PKK leave Iraqi soil. He predicted any Turkish attacks on northern Iraq would be on a limited scale.

But that is of little comfort to the villagers. They are particularly alarmed by reports that Turkey's generals have drawn up plans to establish a 15-mile buffer zone along the Iraqi side of the border that would include many places where refugees have settled.

Yet the Turks are already here - and have been for over a decade, with the tacit agreement of the Kurdish authorities. At one end of the Sabna valley, a garrison of Turkish soldiers occupies the Barmani airbase. To the east, in the hilltop town of Amediya, a Turkish tank watches from a small outpost. Their role is to monitor the PKK fighters, though the guerrillas are actually far away. "We don't like them to be here, but what can we do?" said Mohsen Qatani, a local tribal chief. "We ignore them and hope they ignore us. It is not our fight."

Bishop Shlimon said an estimated 6,000 Assyrian Christians who have been uprooted by violence elsewhere have found homes along Iraq's northern border with Turkey. The influx has breathed new life into many semi-abandoned rural communities, he said. This week in Anishky, for example, a Christian from Baghdad opened a hall where 1,000 people could gather for weddings.

"But if Turkey continues to raid or bomb us, or even invades," said Bishop Shlimon, "then how will any of us get the peace or the life we are looking for?"

Refugee warning

Local authorities in the Kurdistan region said they feared 30,000 people may be displaced if Turkish troops enter across the border. The UN's high commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, also warned of the danger of a refugee crisis in northern Iraq if Turkey attacks. "The northern governorate, or Kurdistan ... has been the most stable area of Iraq," he said. "It is an area also where you find Iraqis from the south and central Iraq who came seeking security. I can only express our deep concern about any development that might lead to meaningful displacements of population."

In the village of Barnatha, Juliet Jabril, 37, said she missed her life and her hairdressing business in Baghdad, which she left in July.

"There was no alternative but to leave," she said tearfully. First she saw an 11-year-old boy, who was selling petrol on the street outside her salon, shot dead. Then masked men visited her salon and told her that hairdressing "was against the will of Allah".

"I know the fate of other hairdressers," she said. "All I want is to live in peace, and I thought Kurdistan would offer me sanctuary." She said she did not support the PKK's violence, but worried that if they were forced to leave their bases, "it might create space for Islamic militants to come in from Iran".

"And then we'd see the masked men in our beautiful valley," she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2195573,00.html