ISTANBUL, 4 November 2007 — Iraq said yesterday it was ready to hunt down and arrest Kurdish guerrilla leaders responsible for cross-border raids into Turkey and closed down the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Solution party, an organization with close ties to PKK guerrillas. Separately, a news agency close to the guerrillas said eight Turkish soldiers captured by them on Oct. 21 will be released today.
Major powers and countries in the region, meeting in Istanbul to discuss Iraqi security, sought to ease tension on the Turkish-Iraqi border that could escalate into a bigger regional crisis.
Turkey wants leaders of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) arrested and seeks the closure of camps in northern Iraq which they use as bases for cross-border attacks in their 23-year-old campaign for a homeland in southeast Turkey.
Amid intensified diplomacy between Turkey, Iraq and the United States, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki met Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul.
“The prime minister renewed the willingness of the Iraqi government to take steps to isolate the terrorist PKK, prevent any help reaching its members, chase and arrest them, and put them in front of the Iraqi judiciary because of their terrorist activities,” Maliki’s office said in a statement.
Maliki’s spokesman added that Baghdad did not rule out joint military action with Ankara, although Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said: “I think there is a whole number of measures to be taken before getting to that.”
A senior Turkish diplomat, who declined to be named, said a meeting between Turkey, Iraq and the United States “wasn’t satisfactory for Turkey” because old promises rather than new concrete proposals were presented.
Turkey is impatient at what it sees as US and Iraqi foot-dragging over the threat from the PKK and has massed 100,000 troops on the border for a possible offensive against about 3,000 rebels using Iraq as a base. But the government in Baghdad has little influence over the semi-autonomous Kurdish regions in the north and the success of any measures against PKK militants would depend on the cooperation of Kurdish authorities. Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani has so far refused to arrest PKK members.
But there were signs of the autonomous Kurdish government taking small steps to stave off a full-fledged Turkish invasion. It shut down the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Solution party.
Turkey has sought the party’s closure, accusing it of being a front organization for the PKK.
Security officials first shut the party’s office in Irbil, a northern Iraqi city that serves as capital to the government of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Later yesterday, forces surrounded the party’s headquarters in Sulaimaniyah and closed down that office as well, security and party officials said.
The Brussels-based Firat news agency, generally considered a mouthpiece of the PKK, said the captured Turkish soldiers would be handed over to pro-Kurdish MPs at an undisclosed location.
The soldiers were captured when their unit was ambushed near the border with Iraq. The attack also left 12 other soldiers dead.
At the Istanbul meeting, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal reiterated the Kingdom’s condemnation of terrorist attacks against Turkey and expressed his condolences to the families of victims. “There is no justifications for those attacks and every efforts should be made to stop these encroaches,” he added.
He said the Kingdom had always called for strengthening the unity of Iraq and protecting its independence and sovereignty. “We are against any interference in Iraq’s internal affairs... and we maintain equal distance from all ethnic groups in the country,” he said.
