ISTANBUL: Turkey has massed troops along its Iraqi border to increase pressure on the United States and the new government in Baghdad to act against a growing threat from Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq.
But despite a rise in guerrilla violence and media reports of some cross-border military activity, Turkey is unlikely to launch a major incursion into northern Iraq without the consent of authorities in the region, diplomats and analysts say.
The Turkish army traditionally launches a spring offensive against the rebels as they descend from their mountain hideouts, but the latest military build-up is the biggest for years.
Turkey has sent some 40,000 troops to its mainly Kurdish southeast region to reinforce some 220,000 already based there in anticipation of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant raids.
“There has been a higher level of military movement compared to recent years because the PKK has sent large numbers of militants into Turkey and there is intelligence that they are planning more operations than in previous years,” a senior military official told Reuters.
Up to 5,000 PKK rebels are holed up in the Iraqi mountains.
Senior PKK commander Murat Karayilan has threatened to retaliate if Turkey or Iran attacked guerrilla bases in Iraq, accusing them of mounting coordinated anti-rebel operations.
Ankara insists it has the right under international law to carry out cross-border operations against the rebels if need be.
At a briefing for defence correspondents this week, military officials renewed a warning that the army may conduct operations across the border “if the conditions arise”.
One Ankara-based Western diplomat said the military build-up had an operational justification, given the escalation of rebel violence, and a symbolic political justification, sending a signal to the Iraqi authorities and the United States.
“They don’t want (the PKK) to feel they can be successful in escalating the conflict. (The other aim is) to increase pressure on the new Iraqi government and the US to be more proactive against the PKK,” the diplomat said.
“None of this suggests that Turkey would be willing to take the political risk to act on its own in northern Iraq,” he added. Such a step could endanger Turkey’s relations with the European Union, with which it started entry talks last October.
Ankara blames the PKK for the deaths of more than 30,000 people since the group began its armed campaign for a Kurdish state in southeast Turkey in 1984. In the last year the level of violence has reached a level not seen since before PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured in 1999.
In recent months, dozens of rebels and soldiers have died in clashes and Kurdish militants have carried out bomb attacks in Istanbul. Authorities also blame the PKK for street clashes between Kurds and security forces in which 17 people have died.
With the consent of the United States, Nato member Turkey has kept a contingent of up to 1,500 special forces in northern Iraq since Iraqi Kurdish groups clashed there in 1996.
A report in Zaman newspaper said on Thursday the Turkish military had deployed 30 tanks to monitor rebel movements in northern Iraq in Bawerli, some 15 km inside the Iraqi border.—Reuters
