ANKARA, 28 April 2003 — Turkey denied yesterday that it had sent special forces and arms into Kurdish-held northern Iraq in a bid to fuel unrest and pave the way for a Turkish peacekeeping mission.
The Time Magazine on Friday quoted US military sources as saying that they had earlier in the week intercepted a unit of Turkish commandos attached to a humanitarian aid convoy in a bid to reach the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
The sources said that the mission of the commandos — caught with an arsenal of automatic rifles and grenades — was to increase tension between the Turkmen and Kurdish population in Kirkuk to justify a Turkish military intervention in the area.
But Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said yesterday that security officials, and not special forces, were accompanying aid convoys crossing into Iraq from Turkey.
“To provide the security of the convoys, there was an accompaniment of officials and people were aware of this,” Gul told reporters here.
He also denied that they had a large cache of weapons with them. “There was no weapons inside the aid material apart from the weapons the officials carried on their persons,” Gul said.
A story in the New York Times yesterday said that US soldiers who stopped a Turkish aid convoy at a checkpoint Wednesday found several dozen AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, grenade launchers, pistols, and night-vision goggles hidden inside the vehicles.
Twelve of the two dozen men in the convoy identified themselves as Turkish special forces and were escorted back to the Turkish border, the paper said.
US sources told Time that Turkish forces infiltrating northern Iraq would in the long run try to smuggle in weapons and money to give to the Turkmen minority, which has often clashed with the Kurds.
Turkey has threatened to send in soldiers to northern Iraq if Kurds try to seize Kirkuk and the oil-rich city of Mosul, whose revenues may inspire them to declare independence. Turkey categorically opposes a Kurdish state next door, fearing that such a move could reignite insurgency among its own Kurdish population in southeastern Anatolia.
Turkish officials were greatly agitated when Kurdish fighters seized Mosul and Kirkuk earlier in the month, and put pressure on the United States to force them out.
US forces are now in control of the two cities and Ankara has sent military observers to the area, under a deal with Washington, to observe the situation on the ground.
Meanwhile, two Turkish soldiers were killed and two others wounded in fighting with Kurdish rebels in the east of the country after three months of quiet, the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday.
