Turkey is threatening to invade Iraq after Kurdish separatists killed at least 17 of its soldiers in a series of co-ordinated attacks within Turkish territory.As many as 100,000 troops have been deployed close to the border between the two countries as President Abdullah Gul's office vowed to pay "whatever price necessary" to defeat terrorism.
Militants from the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, claimed to have taken several Turkish soldiers alive during the fighting and Turkey is bracing itself for a drawn-out hostage crisis.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said that Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, had urged Turkey to wait a few days pause before any potential response.
In a sign that Ankara still hopes for eleventh-hour assistance from Washington, Mr Erdogan said: "We expect the United States to take swift steps [against the PKK] befitting of our strategic partnership."
The United States, Turkey's staunch Nato ally, is anxious to avert any Turkish military strikes against the rebels, who attacked positions from hideouts in northern Iraq, fearing this could destabilise a relatively peaceful part of the country.
The attacks, the worst in more than a decade by the rebels, came just four days after Turkey's parliament overwhelmingly approved a motion to allow troops to enter northern Iraq to fight the guerrillas.
A statement from President Gul's office said: "While respecting the territorial integrity of Iraq, Turkey will not shy away from paying whatever price is necessary to protect its rights, its laws, its indivisible unity and its citizens."
When Vecdi Gonul, the defence minister, was asked directly if there would be a military response to the attacks, he said: "Not urgently. They [the Turkish troops] are planning a cross-border [incursion] ... We would like to do these things with the Americans."
Mr Erdogan, who is due in London this week to meet Gordon Brown, said in response to the attacks: "Our anger, our hatred is great."
The violence began when PKK militants blew up a bridge under cover of darkness on Saturday night as an army convoy was crossing it, killing at least a dozen soldiers and wounding sixteen more.
The Turkish army said it then launched a number of mopping up operations on what it believed to be PKK positions and by nightfall it claimed to have killed 32 "guerrillas".
In a separate incident a minibus carrying Kurdish civilians was hit by a roadside bomb, believed to have been planted by the PKK and seventeen people were injured, two of them seriously.
The incidents took place within a few miles of Daglica, a small Turkish town just north of the junction where Turkey's borders with Iran and Iraq meet.
The area is rugged and with high mountains providing cover for the insurgents who cross over the border from the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq where the ethnic Kurdish authorities tolerate PKK training camps and depots.
The remoteness of the site of the attack and tight Turkish security that blocks road access meant it was impossible for journalists or other sources to give independent confirmation of official accounts.
While Turkish authorities were adamant they had killed 32 PKK members, in past retaliatory operations by the army Kurdish civilians have often been caught in the cross fire.
There was also no immediate confirmation of the claims, made by a pro-Kurdish news agency based in Belgium, that several soldiers had been taken hostage.
The PKK has taken several soldiers and even a few journalists hostage since its military campaign for a Kurdish homeland in Turkey was launched in 1984 but all have been released unharmed.
Across the border in Iraq, the local authorities again denounced the PKK but, as has been seen many times in the past, they showed no sign of taking direct action against the group.
Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, who is himself an ethnic Kurd and led a Kurdish separatist group for years in an armed struggle against Saddam Hussein, ordered the PKK to leave.
"We have appealed to the PKK to desist fighting and to transform themselves from military organisations into civilian and political ones," Mr Talabani said.
"But if they [the PKK] insist on the continuation of fighting, they should leave Kurdistan, Iraq, and not create problems here.”
The PKK appears determined to draw Turkey into cross border raids into Iraq in order to hurt Ankara's wider strategic interests.
Cross-border raids would seriously damage Ankara's links with Washington which is already struggling to stabilise Iraq post-Saddam Hussein.
And it would jeopardise Turkey's bid to join the European Union as stable borders are pre-requisite to accession.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=F0FZLRSR13HIVQFIQMGCFFWAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2007/10/22/wturk122.xml
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário