BAGHDAD—Turkish combat planes and ground troops crossed into northern Iraq on Wednesday to hunt down Kurdish guerrillas who had killed 29 members of Turkey’s security forces and five civilians in a series of raids over the last two days. The incursion, which Turkish news accounts said killed 21 members of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), underscored the fragile state of Iraq’s security 11 weeks before all US troops are to be withdrawn from the country.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, no doubt embarrassed by the latest operation by a guerrilla group that operates in a part of Iraq where the Iraqi army does not, made no comment on the Turkish move.
“We have been clashing with the Turkish forces in two areas since around 3 a.m. today,” Dostdar Hamo, a spokesman for the rebel group in northern Iraq, told The Associated Press by telephone. Turkey asked Iraq last week to move against rebel bases in northern Iraq, saying “its “patience is running out” in the face of rebel attacks directed at Turkey from Iraqi soil.
“No one should forget that those who make us suffer this pain will be made to suffer even stronger,” Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul told reporters on Wednesday. “They will see that the vengeance for these attacks will be immense and many times stronger.”
Massoud Barzani, president of the semiautonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region, telephoned Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to condemn the killing of 24 Turkish troops by PKK guerrillas on Wednesday as a “criminal act” that was “first and foremost against the interests of the people of Kurdistan.” Turkey’s military operation came just hours after the Wednesday attacks, which PKK guerrillas launched on seven security posts in the southeastern province of Hakkari. In addition to the 24 soldiers killed, the attacks wounded 18 others.
One day earlier, PKK guerrillas killed five police officers and four civilians in southeastern Bitlis province.
The two days of attacks brought to at least 50 the number of Turks, including 17 civilians, killed since July by the Kurdish militants. Turkish news reports said fighter jets bombed at least four suspected PKK training camps as troops moved several miles inside Iraq and helicopters dropped Turkish commando units. It was unclear how long Turkish troops intended to remain inside Iraq.
Erdogan canceled a planned trip to Kazakhstan to announce “wide-reaching operations, including hot-pursuit operations” against PKK targets. As Turks staged protest marches in several cities, President Gul warned that Turkey’s “revenge” for the attacks “will be tenfold.”
President Barack Obama threw his support behind Erdogan, promising “strong cooperation” with “one of our closest and strongest allies” as it “works to defeat the terrorist threat from the PKK.” The PKK assaults in Turkey were an ominous warning of the security and political challenges that are likely to confront Iraq’s fragile central government in the absence of an American military presence.
Earlier this week, thousands of Kurds in Khanaqin, a town in Diyala province, staged a march to demand the right to fly the Kurdish flag over public buildings instead of the Iraqi national flag. One Kurdish protester set himself on fire and remains in critical condition in a hospital. The United States enjoys extremely cordial ties with Iraqi Kurds, who thrived for a dozen years largely outside Saddam Hussein’s control after the US imposed a no-fly zone over the region at the end of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. Since the toppling of Hussein in 2003, US military officials have taken an active role in managing conflicts between the Kurds and Iraq’s other ethnic groups.
But the US has been unable to persuade local Kurdish authorities to clamp down on the PKK, which operates in areas that are largely inaccessible to the Iraqi army and are only lightly patrolled by the Iraqi Kurds peshmerga militia. The last time Turkey invaded northern Iraq was in 2008, following an upsurge in PKK cross-border violence.
