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US Tries To Halt Turkey Attack
The Guardian (UK) ^ | 10-14-2007 | Peter Beaumont

Posted on 10/14/2007 5:13:14 PM PDT by blam

US tries to halt Turkey attack

Diplomats fly to Ankara to stop military move against Iraqi Kurds after 'genocide' resolution

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday October 14, 2007
The Observer (UK)

Senior US officials were engaged last night in last-ditch efforts to persuade Turkey not to launch a major military incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan to target armed separatists. A team was diverted from a mission to Russia to make an unscheduled stop in Ankara yesterday. Against the background of the escalating diplomatic row between Turkey and the US over a congressional resolution that branded as 'genocide' massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, revealed she had personally urged Turkey to refrain from any major military operation in northern Iraq. The row between the two Nato allies comes against the dangerous background of a threat by the Turkish parliament to approve this week a 'hot pursuit' of the Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, across the border into northern Iraq.

The threat of military action came after last Sunday's killing by the PKK of 13 Turkish soldiers in an ambush in Sirnak province, close to the Iraqi border. 'I urged restraint,' said Rice, on a visit to Moscow, acknowledging 'a difficult time' between the two countries as she described her telephone conversations with Turkey's President Abdullah Gul, its Prime Minister and foreign minister.

'It's a difficult time for the relationship,' Rice said. 'We just thought it was a very good idea for two senior officials to go and talk to the Turks and have reassurance to the Turks that we really value this relationship.' Rice said that in her conversation with the Turks 'they were dismayed' by the congressional resolution. 'The Turkish government, I think,

(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: attack; iraq; turkey; us
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To: processing please hold
I disagree that this is about oil. Turkey's main problem are Kurdish terrorists, aka PKK, coming into Turkey illegaly from Iraq and killing Turkish citizens, tourists and soliders. This has been going on for decades, and has only been getting worse since the start of the Iraqi war. For whatever reason, the Iraqi Kurds have done little to quell the terrorists among them from attacking Turkey.

Imagine Mexican terrorists from Mexico routinely coming in to the U.S. and bombing and killing hundreds of American civilians and soldiers, and Mexico doing nothing to put a stop to it? How would you want the U.S. to respond? At what point do you say - enough is enough?

121 posted on 10/14/2007 8:33:06 PM PDT by L.M.H.
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To: 2111USMC
When the Turks start lobbing artillery shells into northern Iraqi towns and killing innocent civilians, are we just going to stand by?

They already HAVE started lobbing artillery shells into northern Iraqi towns.

Turkey DID commit genocide of the Armenians (I learned more about that from an old Armenian in my town whose parents were among the few who managed to escape into Bulgaria).

Turkey WILL commit genocide of the Kurds if they can get away with it.

122 posted on 10/14/2007 8:35:08 PM PDT by Solitar ("My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them." -- Barry Goldwater)
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To: avital2

How much land area of Turkey is majority Kurdish?


123 posted on 10/14/2007 8:37:29 PM PDT by CPT Clay (Drill ANWR, Personal Accounts NOW , Vote Hunter in the Primary)
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To: gitmo

Yep, We need Les when turkey’s attack.


124 posted on 10/14/2007 8:37:40 PM PDT by Rb ver. 2.0 (The WOT will end when pork products are weaponized)
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To: processing please hold
RE: Should mexico have had all the oil that was and still is in Tx and the entire South West? Or is that American oil?

Yakis said if Turkey has rights to the oil, they will present the evidence to the international community.

Remember, the borders of those countries were more or less arbitrarily set by Europeans after W.W.I. The "rights" could date from an agreement or two from the days of W.W.I. As I recall Yakis determined that Turkey has no rights to the oil fields.

Hmmm, don't give Mexicorruption any ideas, they're probably looking for those 1848-era documents right now.

125 posted on 10/14/2007 8:39:25 PM PDT by WilliamofCarmichael (If modern America's Man on Horseback is out there, Get on the damn horse already!)
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To: processing please hold
An interesting article.

THE KURDISH CARD IN TURKEY ....
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
[14:40 , 29 Apr 2007]
The current media freak-out in the US is about the silly mouth of radio buffoon Don Imus. Multiply the frenzy by, say, 100 times, and it might give you an idea of the media hysteria right now in Turkey about the serious mouth of Massoud Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq. Sick and tired of Turkish threats to his government, Barzani, in an interview on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television, unloaded on Turkey: "If Ankara allows itself to interfere in our affairs, we will then interfere for the 30 million Kurds in Turkey."

The interview was broadcast while I was in Arbil (Hawler), capital of Iraqi Kurdistan last Saturday (4/7), and the Kurds there were in a state of ecstatic glee over Barzani's daring to identify Turkey's deepest fear. It's hard for us here in America to grasp what sort of rhetorical nuclear bomb Barzani dropped with these words.

Turkey is bigger than Texas, about 300,000 square miles. The entire southeastern third, some 100,000 square miles, is predominately Kurdish. Turkey's total population is a little over 70 million. Barzani was stretching it to claim 30 million of them are Kurdish, but there's certainly well over 20.

This means one third of Turkey's land and population isn't Turkish - it's Kurdish.

The Kurds were allowed to pretty much run their affairs during the Ottoman Empire. But as we saw last week in Where the Cold War Began, Where Islamofascism Can End, when the Allies broke apart the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I and Kemal Attaturk carved modern Turkey out of it, Turkey's Kurds were left out in the tyrannical cold.

The Turkish government officially denied their very existence, insisting they were "Mountain Turks," and their ancient Indo-European language was a form of Turkish. Even so, the Kurdish language was banned - you couldn't even speak it in the streets, much less teach or use it in schools.

As the government in Ankara brutally suppressed the Kurds, it became an ally of the West in the Cold War and a dedicated member of NATO. A major goal of the Soviet Union was the destabilization of Turkey, which it bordered on three sides (east with Soviet Armenia, north across the Black Sea, and northwest with Soviet Bulgaria).

When various other efforts failed, the Soviets decided to play the "Kurdish card" in the destabilization game. A KGB agent named Yevgeny Primakov was dispatched in 1978 to work with a Kurdish student leader on the Soviet payroll named Abdullah ícalan (pronounced Urch-a-lon) to form a Marxist-Leninist "liberation movement" called the Kurdish Workers Party, known as the PKK (Kurdish initials for Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan).

Primakov, working out of the Soviet embassy in Ankara, also helped organize a series of riots and disturbances in cities throughout the country, resulting in a military coup by the Turkish Army in 1980 as the only way to stop them.

The PKK, with Soviet money and arms, began a guerrilla insurgency with the declared goal of liberating Turkish Kurdistan and creating a separate Kurdish state - albeit a Soviet colony, either encompassed within the USSR like Armenia or without as a "satellite" like Bulgaria.

The Turkish military fought back with incredible heartlessness. Army "special war units" slaughtered tens of thousands of Kurds, wiped out hundreds of entire towns and villages off the map after indulging in mass rape and pillage.

The PKK, posing as liberators, were more ruthless towards Kurds who did not join them, who rejected Communism forced upon them, than against Turkish soldiers. PKK guerrillas and Communist fanatics killed almost as many Kurds as the Turkish Army.

This was throughout the 1980s, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the PKK steadily lost ground. Finally, in 1999, ícalan was captured. And what do you suppose happened? The PKK formed an alliance with the "special war units" of the Turkish Army.

What was the purpose of such an alliance? The same as that between Afghanistan's Taliban and Pakistan's military intelligence - to make drug money.

Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's opium poppies made into heroin. I explained how the ISI (Pakistan military intel) set up the Taliban as its partner in the opium business way back in October, 2003 in Afghan Poppies. (And to update the article, the CIA has still done nothing about it.)

The ISI oversees labs in Afghanistan, such as in Nangarhar and Helmand provinces, that convert the opium sap into morphine paste molded into bricks. The major drug conduit to Europe is now from Afghanistan through Iran - transshipment made possible by the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) - and into Turkey, where the morphine bricks are reprocessed into grades of white or brown heroin.

In other words, the heroin drug smuggling corridor from poppy farmer in Afghanistan to lab processing to shipment into Europe is operated by government/military networks in Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey in collusion with terrorist groups such as the Taliban and the PKK.

Note this means that the PKK works with both elements in the Turkish Army and elements in the Iranian military.

As a cover, the Turkish military uses the PKK as a scaremongering rationale for suppressing Kurdish freedoms - while allowing the PKK to suppress any competition as monopoly "spokesman" for Kurds in Turkey.

This cozy affair has been upset by the success of a semi-independent Kurdish state right across the Turkish border in Iraq - and by the emergence of rivals to the PKK, legitimate Kurdish political parties advocating genuine democracy for all people in Turkey and ending the second-class citizen status of Turkish Kurds.

So how does the Turkish government respond? Threaten the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, of course.

The made-up excuse is the "rights" of the Turcomans - an ethnic group with whom Ankara claims kinship residing in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Traditionally the center of Kurdish culture, after the Gulf War in 1991 and a horrifically suppressed Kurdish revolt, Kirkuk was "Arabized" by Saddam Hussein, with hundreds of thousands of Kurds forcibly removed and Arabs moved in who got to seize Kurdish homes and property.

Since the American liberation of Iraq in 2003, Kirkuk has been systematically "de-Arabized" with the dispossessed Kurds moving back in and Arabs moving out. This has now reached the stage where the Barzani government feels comfortable with holding a Kirkuk Status Referendum on November 15, 2007 for the residents of Kirkuk to decide on their city being formally annexed to the Kurdistan Regional Government.

This is enraging Ankara - for after the referendum (which will overwhelmingly choose to join the KRG), Kirkuk will be the capital of a strong - and rich - Kurdish state. Rich because of the legendary Kirkuk multi-billion barrel oil fields.

So Ankara issues threats of military invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, and finally Barzani last weekend struck back.

Every Turkish language newspaper is lashing out with diatribes against Barzani. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pronounced Air-doh-wan) proclaims Barzani will be "crushed." These are words of very scared people.

They know Barzani's Kurdish card is far more powerful than any they can play. If the tens of millions of Kurds in Turkey look to Barzani as their liberator, the Turkish state could end as we know it.

Yet Barzani's purpose is not to cause a civil war in Turkey and break it apart. He wants for Turkey's Kurds what he has achieved for Iraq's - regional autonomy and freedom, and playing a full role in the country's governance.

More and more, the predictions made in The Kurdish Key to the Middle East have a likelihood of coming true. Barzani is forcing the Turks to understand the Kurds are a solution, not a threat. It's going to be a difficult lesson for stubborn Turks to learn - but one way or the other, they will learn to treat Kurds as full citizens of their country.

Either that, or they won't have their country in one piece for long.

[end]

Don't believe for one second that Turkey is doing this because of the Armenian Genocide resolution. That's the story they're feeding everybody and too many are swallowing it hook, line and sinker.

126 posted on 10/14/2007 8:42:10 PM PDT by processing please hold (Duncan Hunter '08) (ROP and Open Borders-a terrorist marriage and hell's coming with them)
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To: processing please hold
RE: Turkey is an islamist state and that should never be forgotten.

Do you have any sources for that?

Here's why I ask. Earlier this year hundreds of thousands of Turks took to the streets to protest the AKP and to affirm their commitment to their constitutional democratic republic.

The Army enjoys great public support and it is the Army's duty to protect the Republic. The Army has warned the AKP more than once.

If you do look for sources you will find my sources. Turkey is not an Islamist state.

127 posted on 10/14/2007 8:48:07 PM PDT by WilliamofCarmichael (If modern America's Man on Horseback is out there, Get on the damn horse already!)
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To: CPT Clay
How much land area of Turkey is majority Kurdish?

About one quarter.

Kurdistan -- Wikipedia

128 posted on 10/14/2007 8:50:15 PM PDT by Solitar ("My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them." -- Barry Goldwater)
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To: submarinerswife

Thank you. I appreciate it.


129 posted on 10/14/2007 8:55:12 PM PDT by DoughtyOne (Hillary has pay fever. There she goes now... "Ha Hsu, ha hsu, haaaa hsu, ha hsu...")
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To: processing please hold
Tell me what your goals for the next two years would be as it relates to Turkey.

I don't believe this is an unreasonable request. If you don't like our current policies, please explain how you would like to see them changed.

130 posted on 10/14/2007 9:02:15 PM PDT by DoughtyOne (Hillary has pay fever. There she goes now... "Ha Hsu, ha hsu, haaaa hsu, ha hsu...")
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To: WilliamofCarmichael
Yakis said if Turkey has rights to the oil, they will present the evidence to the international community.

Why would Turkey have the rights to oil in another sovereign country?

What about Russia? Can they petition the international courts and say all the oil in Alaska is theirs?

How long has Kirkuk been a part of Iraq? Was it a part of Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq? If so, that makes Turkey's claim nonexistent and the arbitrary borders set by Europe, nonexistent as well.

Hmmm, don't give Mexicorruption any ideas, they're probably looking for those 1848-era documents right now.

LOL. I hope no one in Russia is reading this too. Putin's feeling his oats now and just might try it. :)

131 posted on 10/14/2007 9:05:39 PM PDT by processing please hold (Duncan Hunter '08) (ROP and Open Borders-a terrorist marriage and hell's coming with them)
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To: DoughtyOne
Tell me what your goals for the next two years would be as it relates to Turkey.

If you're sure you want to know my answer, I'll tell ya. You ain't gonna like it.

In a magical world where I was president of the United States, I'd call Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and tell him to f-off. I'd immediately pull every piece of our equipment and every soldier on their soil out. Inform him that this was happening as I speak. I would tell him that if one of his troops entered Iraq I would blast his country to hell. Tell him to go ask if Assad, or imanutjob over in Iran would come to his aid. And before I hung up on his ass I'd add, his days of being on the American taxpayers gravy train has pulled into the station.

But, that's just me.

132 posted on 10/14/2007 9:18:22 PM PDT by processing please hold (Duncan Hunter '08) (ROP and Open Borders-a terrorist marriage and hell's coming with them)
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To: blam

This article was a huge disappointment after the very promising title.

;)


133 posted on 10/14/2007 9:23:16 PM PDT by Zechariah_8_13 (www.GOOOH.com)
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To: blam
Senior US officials were engaged last night in last-ditch efforts to persuade Turkey not to launch a major military incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan to target armed separatists.

Bet the neo-cons never saw this coming in 2002.

134 posted on 10/14/2007 9:25:19 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (Repeal the Terrible Two - the 16th and 17th Amendments. Sink LOST! Stop SPP!)
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To: processing please hold

Okay. Then what would you do with Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Each of these has been problematic in their own right.


135 posted on 10/14/2007 9:25:33 PM PDT by DoughtyOne (Hillary has pay fever. There she goes now... "Ha Hsu, ha hsu, haaaa hsu, ha hsu...")
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To: DoughtyOne
Okay. Then what would you do with Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Each of these has been problematic in their own right.

Moving the goal post I see. OK. I'll still play.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1911227/posts?page=132#132

136 posted on 10/14/2007 9:34:32 PM PDT by processing please hold (Duncan Hunter '08) (ROP and Open Borders-a terrorist marriage and hell's coming with them)
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To: processing please hold

I’m not sure exactly why you’re so testy. If you don’t want to discuss this just say so.

The point is, that if we’re going to take on Turkey, then I don’t see how you can wait to take on Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Each of them are problematic in their own right. If we’re going to lay down the law to Turkey, because Islamic nations are our enemy and we must do so now, then what do we do? Do we take on all Islamic nations now?

If so, does that include the those in South East Asia?


137 posted on 10/14/2007 9:42:20 PM PDT by DoughtyOne (Hillary has pay fever. There she goes now... "Ha Hsu, ha hsu, haaaa hsu, ha hsu...")
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To: DoughtyOne
I'm not being testy I promise you. You asked what I'd do and I told you. See, I said you wouldn't like my answer.

Syria,

Killing our troops in Iraq.

Iran,

Killing our troops in Iraq.

Saudi Arabia

Killing our troops in Iraq.

and Pakistan.

Killing our troops in Iraq.

My answer stands.

138 posted on 10/14/2007 9:49:19 PM PDT by processing please hold (Duncan Hunter '08) (ROP and Open Borders-a terrorist marriage and hell's coming with them)
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To: processing please hold
RE: "Why would Turkey have the rights to oil in another sovereign country?"

Don't forget this started with my response to your post suggesting that Turkey was after the oil.

My purpose for responding was to counter any intimation that Turkey would seize the oil fields militarily -- in the near term.

To repeat, four years ago Yakis instructed government legal advisors to examine a number of treaties in order to evaluate Turkey’s rights over oil fields in the Mosul and Kirkuk regions of northern Iraq.

Something new: Stressing that the regions were traditionally areas where ethic Turkmens reside.

This is a very important and potentially explosive issue sometime in the future.

It is connected to the larger issue of an emerging state of "Kurdistan". I am passing a link to an article discussing the Turkoman people of Krikuk and Mosul, in case you are interested.

For centuries, the Turkomans have been part of the urban elite in cities such as Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk.

It's a long, detailed article but just may reveal why -- sometime in the future -- Turkey just may believe that it has a right to -- indeed must -- intervene militarily.

Thanks for the polite discussion.

139 posted on 10/14/2007 9:50:40 PM PDT by WilliamofCarmichael (If modern America's Man on Horseback is out there, Get on the damn horse already!)
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To: processing please hold

I’m basicly neutral on your answer. I disagree, but that’s about it.

We seem to be having such a hard time keeping troops on the ground in Iraq that we are having to demand our troops re-up two and three times. Despite this you seem to favor expanding our field of operations over a vast region of the Middle East.

Who will be administering the regions we’re at war with, if these regions don’t wish to take it lying down?

If we were to expand into other nations in the Middle East, I don’t doubt for a moment that we would have some serious terrorism on our own soil. That wouldn’t have to be major. It could just be resturants and movie theaters. Churches could be a target.

I don’t see the benefit or even the viability of us doing what you think would be proper at this time. And if we did persue it, I don’t think it would take China or Russia long to notice we were maxed to the very breaking point, even before one or both started their own adventurism.

What then?

I disagree with you regarding Turkey, because it isn’t realistic. It would alienate Turkey when it’s not necessary that we turn it into a violent enemy.

Thanks for the comments.


140 posted on 10/14/2007 10:01:35 PM PDT by DoughtyOne (Hillary has pay fever. There she goes now... "Ha Hsu, ha hsu, haaaa hsu, ha hsu...")
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