ANKARA, 8 August 2007 — Turkey won promises from Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki yesterday to crack down on Kurdish rebels who use northern Iraq as a base, but said it now needed to see his words being put into action. Maliki and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan signed a statement vowing to root out rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), whose continued operations have drawn threats from Ankara of military intervention in mainly Kurdish northern Iraq.
“The two prime ministers expressed their joint will to fight against terrorist organizations ... including the PKK-Kongra Gel and reiterated their common understanding to activate every effort to isolate, pacify and eradicate the presence of all terrorist organizations in Iraq,” the statement said.
But Turkish officials said they knew Maliki had little clout in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq and that he had also been weakened both by Iraq’s dire security situation and by fresh turmoil in his crumbling government in Baghdad.
“Whether we are satisfied or not will depend on the implementation, but I can say we have seen a green light (from the Iraqi side),” a Turkish Foreign Ministry official said. “We have binding promises from Iraq. They said they are ready to do everything including exchange of intelligence.”
Despite Maliki’s pledges, Iraq’s Kurdish leaders seem loathe to turn against their ethnic kin. The head of northern Iraq’s Kurdish administration, Masoud Barzani, has consistently rejected Turkish demands to crack down on the PKK. Ankara blames the PKK for the deaths of more than 30,000 people since 1984 when the group launched its armed struggle for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey.
Meanwhile, the prime minister of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region yesterday played down differences with Ankara, as top-level Iraqi-Turkish talks opened on the perceived threat of Kurdish separatism.
Nechirvan Barzani told a news conference in the regional capital Irbil that Turkish troops were positioned in the Iraqi-Kurdish enclave with local consent and lent his support to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Maliki’s visit to Ankara.
“There is a Turkish presence in the province and this is in coordination with the provincial government,” he said. Turkey has long maintained around 1,500 troops several kilometers inside Iraqi territory to prevent the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which it considers a terrorist group, from crossing its sprawling mountainous border.
