October 12, 2007	Friday	Ramazan 29, 1428

ISTANBUL: Turkey’s parliament could approve a cross-border offensive against Kurdish rebels in Iraq as soon as next week, but that doesn’t mean a risky incursion will follow at once.

Turkey might give diplomacy, and perhaps economic pressure, more time to work even as public pressure for a military mission mounts.

If Turkish forces enter northern Iraq in large numbers, opening another front in the war there, they will seek to avoid the shortcomings of cross-border campaigns since the 1980s that hurt but did not eradicate separatist guerrilla cells. Options include commando raids, aerial bombing and the long-term occupation of a “buffer” zone that seals off mountain routes from Iraq to Turkey.

“There have been 24 operations so far. Assessments have shown that they haven’t yielded that much of a result. We are taking this into account,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on CNN-Turk television on Wednesday.

Parliament was expected to approve a government request to authorise an Iraq campaign as early as next week, after a holiday ending Ramazan. Public outrage is high over attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a rebel group of Turkish Kurds who seek autonomy for the ethnic minority in southeast Turkey.

The group, also known by its Kurdish acronym PKK, took up arms in 1984 and violence reached a peak in the 1990s, diminishing with the 1999 capture in Kenya of rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan. Many Turks are dismayed at a surge in ambushes and bombings that some view as an attempt by the PKK to goad Turkey into an assault on its hideouts in Iraq.

According to this theory, Turkish troops would get bogged down in harsh terrain, harassed by mobile guerrillas. Iraqi Kurds, who run their own administration in northern Iraq, would jump into the fight against Turkey despite a troubled history with the PKK.

A cross-border campaign could also drive a wedge between Turkey and the United States, a Nato ally that opposes any disruption of one of the few relatively stable parts of Iraq. The relationship is already tense because of a US congressional bill that would label the mass killings of Armenians by Turks around the time of World War I as genocide.

Turkey’s bid to join the European Union might also suffer because an Iraq campaign could have a polarising effect on Turkish Kurds, jeopardising EU-backed efforts to grant more rights to the ethnic minority.

“There would be a great reaction once we enter northern Iraq. We need to calculate what would happen in Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, Diyarbakir or Sirnak,” said Ihsan Arslan, a Kurdish lawmaker from the ruling party. The homeland of Turkey’s 20 million Kurds is in the southeast, but many moved to cities nationwide, fleeing violence and seeking jobs.

With so much at stake, Erdogan might wait to see if his parliament’s approval for an offensive acts as leverage, prodding the United States into action against the PKK even though US forces are tied down in fighting George Bush at a scheduled meeting in Washington next month.

“The government is not in favour of ordering the military to enter immediately. It will put the authorisation into its pocket and wait. It will exhaust all diplomatic channels,” wrote Bilal Cetin, a commentator for Turkey’s Vatan newspaper.

Turkey could also put economic pressure on the landlocked Iraqi Kurds, who have not sought outright independence from Iraq partly because their powerful neighbours can choke off trade at any time. Turkey provides electricity and oil products to northern Iraq, and the annual trade volume at Habur gate, the main border crossing, is more than $10 billion.

Iran, which is fighting a rebel group of Iranian Kurds linked to the PKK, reopened border crossings on Monday after a two-week closure. The border points had been closed to protest the US detention of an Iranian official.

Turkish media said an incursion would involve airborne commando assaults on PKK camps, some of which are believed to be 30 kilometers inside Iraq, as well as aerial bombing of rebel headquarters in Iraq’s Qandil mountains, 180 kilometers from the Turkish border.

Turkish ground forces could face the possibility of clashes, accidental or not, with Iraqi Kurds or even US-led coalition troops, though the number of American soldiers in that region is small.

Citing government and security sources, Turkey’s Zaman newspaper said a possible incursion would involve up to 15,000 troops, with another 30,000 along the border to deter Iraqi Kurd forces. Some Turkish military monitors have operated for years in northern Iraq with permission from local authorities, and Zaman said a 150-member Turkish base near Dohuk city could be reinforced and used to conduct regular raids.—AP