Category Archives: Turkey

Turks on the march

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Well, this is just great. Reuters is report­ing that Turk­ish for­eign min­is­ter (and pre­vi­ous prime min­is­ter) Abdul­lah Gul said that Turk­ish troops will soon be mov­ing into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan “within the next few hours.” [BBC]
Jonny Dymond of BBC says Turkey has up to 10,000 troops are sit­ting on the bor­der wait­ing to move into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan.
[UPDATE 6:57 p.m. EST: BBC is report­ing that Turks have already crossed the bor­ders.]
This is slap to the United States, which has “cau­tioned” the Turks not to move into the region, but the nego­ti­a­tions between Turkey and the United States pos­si­bly grew so bit­ter that Turkey feels it now doesn’t trust the United States to watch out for its inter­ests in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan.
Qubad Jalal Tal­a­bani, the deputy rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the PUK in Wash­ing­ton, appeared on BBC to explain his party’s view­point.
“It is very wor­ry­ing for my peo­ple,” he said. “We believe that Turk­ish inter­ven­tion in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan is a recipe for dis­as­ter.“
He wor­ried about the prece­dent it might set, and expressed con­cern that Iran or Syria might also decide to move troops into the region to pro­tect their own inter­ests. (Syria and Iran have their own rest­less Kur­dish pop­u­la­tions.)
Kurds have faced this threat for some time now, and many Kurds have pledged to fight the Turks. In an email sent to me some days ago from Arbil, Karzan Aziz, a friend of mine, said, “I do believe that Turkey will face prob­lems if [it] invaded Kurdistan,�as I have met so many peo­ple [who] all repeat the same thing: ‘As we�have been fight­ing against Sad­dam from many decades, we are ready to�fight Turkey some more other decades.’”
Turkey says its goal is to pre­vent an influx of refugees and “ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties,” accord­ing to Gul.
[ASIDE: BBC also is report­ing that Turkey has finally agreed to open up its air­space. Since this has flipped back and forth all day, I’ll believe this when F-16s fly over Incir­lik.]
But Tal­a­bani said this is not needed. “The dis­place­ment of the pop­u­la­tion at the moment is not head­ing toward the moun­tain­ous bor­ders,” he said. “They’re dis­pers­ing among their fam­i­lies in the nearby towns and vil­lages.“
“The Kur­dish peo­ple are actu­ally con­cerned that the Turk­ish mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion is not to pre­vent an influx of refugees into Turkey, but it is in effect an attempt to stran­gle Kur­dish aspi­ra­tions,” he added.
Many Kurds feel this is the first step toward Turk­ish attempts to annex ter­ri­tory. (It has long cov­eted the oil-fields around Kirkuk and Mosul.)
“We under­stand the allied forces will prob­a­bly try to leave our region as quickly as pos­si­bly,” Tal­a­bani said. “But I’m not sure the same can be said for our neighbors.”

Here come the Turks?

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Thursday’s vote in the Turk­ish Par­lia­ment to allow U.S. planes access to Turkey’s air­space is on hold in the face of U.S. oppo­si­tion to Turkey send­ing troops into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. [CNN] So, still no north­ern front.
And lis­ten­ing to CNN, MSNBC et al. would lead one to believe that vic­tory is at hand… That may be so but Kos has a good run-down on trou­bling reports from Reuters that things are not going as smoothly as the net­works and 24-hour news chan­nels might lead peo­ple to believe.
The tough­est bat­tles are yet to come. Strat­for lists the bridges across the Euphrates and the city of Basra as the real tests of Iraqi resis­tance. If the Iraqis don’t attempt to blow the bridge at al-Nasiriyah or offer only token resis­tance in Basra, “then the will of the Iraqi forces to fight has indeed col­lapsed.” [Strat­for] It is, as yet, too early to tell if that is the case.
Umm Qasr is still not 100 per­cent in the con­trol of the British [Reuters], but Ha’aretz and AP are report­ing that U.S. marines will soon be in con­trol.
[UPDATE: 12:26 PM EST, AP reports that U.S. Marines of the 15th MEU, under British com­mand, have taken Umm Qasr. Con­trol allows access to a port for mat�riel and human­i­tar­ian sup­plies.]
At 1734 GMT, Al Jazeera reported bomb­ings in the north­ern oil city of Mosul.
At 1730 GMT, another Marine from the 1st MEU was KIA, with another injured, U.S. defense offi­cials con­firmed. The Marines took fire dur­ing an oper­a­tion near Rumaila.
It seems “A-Day,” the start of “shock and awe” is begin­ning. And just as a side com­ment, I was lis­ten­ing to NPR this morn­ing and the announc­ers sounds almost dis­ap­pointed that they had not seen the “shock and awe” cam­paign yet. Per­haps I’m just being snippy, though.
If this is the begin­ning of shock and awe, it means the Pen­ta­gon has given up on the smaller hits designed to sow con­fu­sion in the Iraqi lead­er­ship and that the full scale bom­bard­ment has begun. The Pen­ta­gon was likely hop­ing to avoid this by punch­ing hard but back­ing off, and see­ing if they could either get the Iraqis to top­ple Sad­dam in a mat­ter of days or they were try­ing to smoke out the lead­er­ship.
Sat-phone and rugged lap­top en route. Will depart for Ankara next week, prob­a­bly Wednes­day or Thurs­day. Will try to hook up with other pho­tog­ra­pher who, like me, is look­ing to get into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. Let’s hope all goes well…

Turkey allows U.S. troops; Saddam to Iraqis: “lock and load!”

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Whoa. Turkey has appar­ently reversed course and will now allow its ter­ri­tory to be used by U.S. troops.
There are no details on how all this will go down yet, but the Turk­ish lira slid to a new low against the dol­lar, sug­gest­ing at least one rea­son for Turkey’s sud­den con­ver­sion.
BlobServer.jpgMater­iél and equip­ment has been tran­sit­ing the coun­try for weeks, but no troops other than a token con­tin­gent of “base inspec­tors.” Most of the boats that were always described as “idling off the Turk­ish coast” have split for the Suez Canal and Kuwait. What good is this rever­sal?
Well, as reported before, hang­ing back until it was too late to offer much help (except maybe over­flight rights) was prob­a­bly Turkey’s plan along. But now that Erdo­gan is Prime Min­is­ter, he’s going to do all he can to prove his inten­tions to Wash­ing­ton. Per­haps he’s rea­son­ing that if Turkey’s help is too lit­tle, too late that can hardly be blamed on him, can it?
Mean­while, far­ther south, aver­age Iraqis are appar­ently arm­ing them­selves in prepa­ra­tion of the chaos that will surely fol­low the onset of hos­til­i­ties, um, Wednes­day? It’s appar­ently an old cul­tural tra­di­tion of Iraqis, but this time — surprise! — it’s been encour­aged by the Ba’ath regime.
But the real dan­ger is not that Iraqis will start fir­ing on Amer­i­can troops but on each other. “No one knows at whom these weapons will be pointed and after a U.S. strike we might see a new Iraq, in the Lebanese or Alger­ian style,” an Arab diplo­mat said.

Situation seriously FUBAR

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Fog of war, indeed. The global sit­u­a­tion regard­ing Iraq has turned into a full-on cock-up.
Turkey — with the prompt­ing of the mil­i­tary — is hav­ing sec­ond thoughts on its vote Sat­ur­day. The U.S. announced the deploy­ment of 60,000 more troops to be sent to Kuwait, bring­ing the forces in the region almost up to Desert Storm lev­els (Then approx. 500,000 with coali­tion forces.) Tomor­row is Hans Blix’s big day at the U.N., where he will deliver another report on the sta­tus of Iraq’s com­pli­ance with UNSCR 1441. The United States con­tin­ues to work the phones for the votes on the Secu­rity Coun­cil, and per­haps most sig­nif­i­cantly, Pres­i­dent Bush has called an 8 pm EST news con­fer­ence in the East Room tonight.
This very well might be the moment the world has been dread­ing, in which Bush gives Sad­dam Hus­sein a final ulti­ma­tum — mainly so jour­nal­ists, aid work­ers and diplo­mats can use the next few days to leave the coun­try. White House spokesman Ari Fleis­cher said Bush’s open­ing state­ment in the East Room would address “the suc­cesses in the war against ter­ror as well as the impor­tance of dis­arm­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein.” He also said Bush still has not decided whether to wage war.
FUBAR in Turkey
Saturday’s vote by the Turks was unex­pected — or was it? — and the mil­i­tary mainly stayed out of the process. But now the Turk­ish mil­i­tary is sig­nal­ing its sup­port for U.S. plans.
Chief of gen­eral staff, Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, has sig­naled to par­lia­ment that the mil­i­tary would really, really like it if the par­lia­ment approved the Amer­i­cans’ request, despite the over­whelm­ing oppo­si­tion to the war. “It’d be a shame for some­thing to hap­pen to your lit­tle gov­ern­ment,” he told par­lia­ment as his picked his fin­ger­nails with a bowie knife. (Not really.) Turk­ish papers are full of the spec­u­la­tion that the Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Party (AKP) gov­ern­ment will sub­mit a new pro­posal after Saturday’s par­lia­men­tary vote. Why didn’t the mil­i­tary speak up before? Ozkok remarked that the mil­i­tary had not made its views pub­lic ear­lier in order to avoid influ­enc­ing the par­lia­ment.
“If we had expressed our views, it would have amounted to pres­sur­ing the par­lia­ment for the approval of the res­o­lu­tion. It wouldn’t have been demo­c­ra­tic,” Ozkok said. (Cue rue­ful laugh­ter.)
In other words, Ozkok told par­lia­ment that the Turk­ish mil­i­tary believes in Turk­ish democ­racy — until it gets a vote it doesn’t like. Has he been tak­ing lessons from Don Rums­feld?
There is no doubt the civil­ian gov­ern­ment got the mes­sage, as Prime Min­is­ter Abdul­lah Gul said Ozkok’s com­ments were “rea­son­able.” Par­lia­ment speaker Bulent Arinc, who is pur­su­ing some agenda of his own, gave a more mea­sured response, say­ing he appre­ci­ated the general’s remarks and thought the tim­ing of the state­ment was “quite telling.“
Approx­i­mately 94 per­cent of the Turk­ish cit­i­zenry opposes a U.S. war with Iraq. Pres­i­dent Bush can’t deride those num­bers as he did the Feb. 15 marches, which brought tens of mil­lions of peo­ple to the streets world­wide, as a “focus group.” Ninety-four per­cent is the pop­u­la­tion. So it seems in order to plant the seeds of democ­racy in Iraq, the United States is pre­pared to ignore the democ­racy next door in Turkey and stomp the sapling in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?
Any­way, as far as plots by the Turk­ish mil­i­tary to uni­lat­er­ally invade Iraqi Kur­dis­tan if a north­ern front can’t be opened up in time (and make no mis­take — the Turk­ish vote sent the White House reel­ing and grasp­ing for alter­na­tives), who the hell knows what’s hap­pen­ing? But state­ments from Ozkok have made clear that the idea of a Turk­ish inva­sion into the region is def­i­nitely on the table.

The Turk­ish offi­cial [speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymity] said that Turkey’s gen­er­als were skep­ti­cal of the abil­ity of the United States to ensure that the Iraqi Kurds did not try to break away if the Sad­dam Hus­sein were deposed.
In his remarks, Gen­eral Ozkok alluded to those con­cerns, and sent a terse warn­ing to the Kurds of north­ern Iraq.
“I remind them of our legit­i­mate right to defend our national inter­ests, and I hope they will be pru­dent and coop­er­a­tive,” Gen­eral Ozkok said. “Those who want to replace peace with con­fronta­tion will also take the respon­si­bil­ity and bear the con­se­quences.” [From the New York Times]

The State Depart­ment is cer­tainly tak­ing the risk of a Turk­ish inter­ven­tion seri­ously, with spokesman Richard Boucher empha­siz­ing that a uni­lat­eral move on north­ern Iraq can not be allowed:

QUESTION: What about the demon­stra­tion in north­ern Iraq by the half a mil­lion Kurds? They’re afraid that the United States is doing a deal maybe with Turkey. What can you say to these peo­ple who are wor­ried?
MR. BOUCHER: I think the first thing I would say is that we have been in touch with peo­ple in north­ern Iraq. You know that we had a del­e­ga­tion at the con­fer­ence of the out­side oppo­si­tion, and we have been meet­ing over time fre­quently with the peo­ple who live in north­ern Iraq. And we’ve always been inter­ested in their wel­fare and their safety. The United States has a very strong record on that point.
Sec­ond of all, I’d say that we’ve always, we’ve dis­cussed very inten­sively with Turk­ish author­i­ties the sit­u­a­tion in north­ern Iraq, in par­tic­u­lar in the con­text of these agree­ments we’ve just reached. And I think the basic out­look there, the basic prin­ci­ples that apply to the United States Gov­ern­ment and the Turk­ish Gov­ern­ment of look­ing for an Iraq that’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive, where all the peo­ple of Iraq can be rep­re­sen­ta­tive and play a role in their gov­ern­ment, but that stays together as a uni­tary state, those are prin­ci­ples we’ve all adopted and that is our out­look on the sit­u­a­tion. We’ve also, I think, made very clear that we would intend to coor­di­nate any mil­i­tary activ­i­ties very closely with the Turk­ish author­i­ties and that we have opposed uni­lat­eral inter­ven­tion from any quar­ter in north­ern Iraq.
QUESTION: On that, a follow-up on that last sen­tence. Do you think that now the Turk­ish forces will not enter inde­pen­dently of United States forces? That’s what everybody’s talk­ing about in north­ern Iraq and in the Mid­dle East.
MR. BOUCHER: As I said, I think first of all, our record on the safety of the peo­ple who live in north­ern Iraq has been quite well estab­lished over the years, and we do con­sider their safety in every­thing we do. We’ve been in close touch with the Turk­ish Gov­ern­ment. We would need to coor­di­nate any mil­i­tary moves with them and they with us, and we’ve always been opposed to uni­lat­eral moves into north­ern Iraq.

This one bears watch­ing.
Mean­while, back at the U.N. …
Bush and Sec­re­tary of State Colin Pow­ell have been work­ing the diplo­mats, hop­ing to wran­gle nine votes and no vetoes from France or Rus­sia, although the lat­ter seems increas­ingly unlikely. Why work the lines so hard if another res­o­lu­tion is “unnec­es­sary” as the White House has con­tended for some time and it looks like a fight the U.S. is going to lose? Well, because domes­tic sup­port for the war increas­ingly hinges on whether the U.N. approves it or not. And that applies even more so for Tony Blair, who could be toast with­out one — espe­cially if Blix comes back tomor­row and says, as is expected, that Iraq is mak­ing progress and tak­ing con­crete steps toward coop­er­a­tion.
All in all, it’s a con­fus­ing time, and if this is the White House’s plan for decep­tion via con­fu­sion, it’s work­ing well. No one seems to know what’s hap­pen­ing with Turkey, the troops and north­ern Iraq, what it will take to get the U.N. on board or even if Tony Blair will be prime min­is­ter at the end of the shoot­ing. The Amer­i­cans’ time table for war is slip­ping by the day, as the moon grows brighter and April’s heat grows nearer. Bush can’t afford to wait much longer. If the Secu­rity Coun­cil fails to approve the U.K.-U.S.-Bulgarian res­o­lu­tion, Bush may be ready to throw up his hands and roll the dice on thou­sands (mil­lions?) of lives, the geostrate­gic bal­ance and his pres­i­dency.
ASIDE: For a good roundup of the U.S. order of bat­tle, check out this story from an old col­league of mine.