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UK and US urge diplomacy as Turkish commandos reach border |
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Written by Times Online
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Tuesday, 23 October 2007 07:45 |
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Turkish diplomatic and military plans were being put into action simultaneously today as commando units were airlifted towards northern Iraq while the country's Foreign Minister arrived in Baghdad for crisis talks.
Ali Babacan's visit is designed to increase the pressure on Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President, to order a crackdown on Kurdish separatist militants who are thought to have killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers and kidnapped eight more.
Turkey insists it wishes to make diplomatic progress in the escalating dispute with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), despite a parliamentary vote last week sanctioning an incursion into the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
The West has placed huge pressure on Turkey not to take military action, with London and Washington issuing a joint statement last night urging the country's leadership to find a diplomatic solution.
“We continue to believe that cooperation and coordination between Turkey and Iraq is the most effective means to eliminate the PKK threat,” said David Miliband, British Foreign Secretary, and Condoleeza Rice, US Secretary of State.
The pair also proposed a three-way meeting with the United States, Iraq and Turkey at a November 2-3 meeting scheduled for Istanbul, in an attempt to find a solution to the crisis.
Skirmishes between Turkish soldiers and PKK rebels continued on the Turkey-Iraq border region yesterday, claiming the lives of 34 rebels so far, according to the military.
As the United States and Europe continued their diplomatic scramble to deter unilateral action, Turkish soldiers were flown by helicopter to the border with Kurdish-run northern Iraq - one of the few stable parts of the country.
Several helicopters were seen to be ferrying commando units and pro-government Kurdish village guards for five hours from the southeastern town of Yuksekova, around 25 miles from Iraq.
Convoys of heavily armed Turkish military vehicles have already begun amassing at the mountainous border.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, who is due to meet Gordon Brown in London today, said that Ms Rice had talked about the possibility of a joint US-Turkish operation against the PKK if they could delay any action by a few days.
He said he expected swift action from Washington if any incursion was to be avoided.
Mr Erdogan is under strong pressure to act against the PKK, which he says has been staging attacks from northern Iraq using US weapons obtained there. Although his government has been cautious, opposition parties have been urging action and accused him of being soft on terror.
Turkey announced yesterday that it was still seeking eight soldiers believed kidnapped by Kurdish rebels after a weekend ambush. That increased the strident calls for a military incursion in pursuit of the PKK in northern Iraq.
Spontaneous protests swelled across Turkey after news of the ambush, which brings to at least 30 the Turkish military death toll over the past two weeks. In the capital, Ankara, an estimated 25,000 people marched, flags waving, to condemn the Kurdish attacks. Pupils in several schools stood in silence as a mark of respect before filing into morning lessons.
The army organised a ceremony in Hakkari province just miles from the Iraqi border before sending the bodies of the fallen soldiers to their families for burial.
Newspapers and television channels were filled with pictures of the dead soldiers, many of them young conscripts with only a few months of army experience. Their families were filmed crying and shaking in the arms of friends.
One of the dead soldiers had only just traced and been reunited with the mother he had not seen since he was five; another was to be married when he returned home in a few months’ time; a third had finished military service the previous week but kept on for one last operation while a fourth has a brother also doing military service in the dangerous border region of Hakkari. |