Iraq’s Governing Council was right to voice its immediate opposition to the deployment of up to 10,000 Turkish troops for peacekeeping duties within its borders. It may come to regret giving in to US pressure to soften its view, when a few hours later it announced only that it was merely “concerned”. In the end though, the Americans may be the people called upon to do the regretting.
At this moment, Washington needs every bit of help it can get in combating the continuing violent opposition in Iraq. Ten thousand tough Turkish soldiers could well make a great deal of difference in the bloody fight against Iraqi resistance. However Ankara is not acting purely out of altruism. Most ordinary Turks have always been opposed to a US attack on Iraq. When Turkish legislators refused Washington the use of Turkey as a launch pad for an attack on Iraq, there was huge popular enthusiasm.
On the face of it nothing has changed to alter the popular Turkish view that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. But behind the scenes there have been changes. The government in Ankara is alarmed at the effectively autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq which it believes now provides a base for some 5,000 fighters of the former Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — Kadek. Having gone some way toward recognizing the cultural and linguistic rights of Turkish Kurds, hard-liners, particularly among the military, have been seeking to retract the liberalization.
Washington appears to have given the Turkish government a clear commitment that it will oppose Kadek and, indeed, may even have promised to use force to root out Kadek fighters on Iraqi territory. Therein lies the legitimate concern of the Iraqi Governing Council. Are the Americans proposing to go in to Kurdish areas of Iraq themselves and seize alleged Kadek rebels or is the Turkish military to be given the green light to do so? Or are the 10,000 Turkish troops to be used elsewhere in Iraq, far away from the Turkish border? The likelihood has to be that Ankara’s soldiers will operate in northern Iraq and will assume an earlier military posture which, in the course of the US invasion, Washington angrily brought to an end. One wonders whether Americans realize just how dangerous their plans are. At the moment, content to be left to run their own affairs, the Kurds of northern Iraq have been relatively peaceful, apart from what they claim are revenge attacks on Iraqi Arabs who, under Saddam, had seized Kurdish properties. But if the Americans, or worse the Turks, seek to interfere with Kadek, the result would be a dangerous confrontation in which the only certainty will be that the Americans will have made themselves yet another enemy in a region where they are very rapidly running out of friends.
