Assyrian Democratic Organization ADO
Bloomberg) — The U.S. has failed to halt a push for power in northern Iraq by the Kurdish minority that threatens stability in the region, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
“Turkey won’t allow the region to be thrown into a chaos,” Erdogan, 50, told his party at the Ankara-based parliament today. “If these ambitions, which threaten to block democratic solutions in Iraq, are not prevented today, we fear they may lead to clashes and delay peace in the region for many years.”
Turkey’s military last week accused Iraqi Kurds of attempting to seize political control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq by moving 350,000 Kurds into the town. Kurds may move to break up Iraq by making Kirkuk the capital of an autonomous state in the north, Turkey fears.
“The forces who say they came to the region to bring democracy, unfortunately, preferred to remain indifferent to these anti-democratic ambitions,” Erdogan said.
The government is concerned that Kurds will demand a homeland in the southeast of Turkey, which borders northern Iraq. Turkey, a U.S. ally, keeps hundreds of troops just inside northern Iraq in a deployment it says is required to stop Turkish Kurdish militants from crossing the border to mount attacks against targets in Turkey.
U.S. Reaction
In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher denied the U.S. government was indifferent to the actions of Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.
“We have made clear our position on terrorism and the PKK in the north, we’re not in any way countenancing their activities,” Boucher said. “And we continue to work, ourselves, against terrorism throughout Iraq, as well as coordinating closely with the Turkish government.”
Iraqi Kurds backed a united Iraqi government Jan. 30 by participating in the national legislative election in which Kurdish politicians were candidates. Northern Iraqi Kurds also run a regional government granted by Iraq’s interim constitution, with an administrative capital in Arbil.
The U.S. and Turkey have “had some differences over Iraq, and those differences have caused problems,” Douglas Feith, U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters in Ankara today. The two countries “have strong common interests in preserving Iraq’s territorial integrity, the unity of the country.”
Turkish officials should “work to explain the value of the alliance” with the U.S. to the Turkish people, Feith said. Most Turks opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Turkish parliament rejected a U.S. request to use Turkey as a staging area for the attack, which President George W. Bush said was needed to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
Turkey’s military has fought militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, in the southeast of the country for two decades at the cost of more than 30,000 lives, most of them Kurdish. Turkey says the U.S. hasn’t done enough to deal with thousands of PKK rebels now holed up in the mountains of northern Iraq.
