Posted on 07/07/2003 6:41:55 PM PDT by Pokey78
The crisis in relations between Washington and Ankara deepened yesterday when Turkey's top general criticised American forces after they uncovered an assassination plot against a US-appointed official in northern Iraq.
Although the Americans released 11 Turkish special forces troops detained in the area yesterday, Gen Hilmi Ozkok, Turkey's chief of staff, made a rare attack on his Nato ally.
In an extraordinary public rebuke, he told Robert Pearson, the American ambassador, and a watching television audience that the arrests had "led to the biggest crisis of confidence ever between Turkish and US forces".
Gen Ozkok's comments signalled that Turkey is not ready to cool the crisis.
Turkish troops were detained in the Kurdish town of Sulaymaniya at gunpoint on Friday in a raid by 100 soldiers of the US 173rd Airborne.
American troops allegedly aimed their weapons at the Turks, put sacks over their heads and handcuffed them, eyewitnesses quoted by the semi-official Anatolian News Agency said.
"It is a great humiliation, it is unacceptable and our government's response has been appallingly timid," said Onur Oymen, an MP from the main opposition Republican People's Party.
But a senior Pentagon official told the New York Times that soldiers were "acting on intelligence about possible illicit activities that were being planned against municipal officials in the region".
US officers said the arrests were made to stop a plot by the Turks to assassinate the ethnic Kurdish governor of the nearby city of Kirkuk.
Unnamed diplomatic sources told reporters that one of those detained in the raid was a Turkish colonel, who had already been expelled twice from Iraq by coalition forces for "suspicious activities".
Turkey has rejected the claims of an assassination plot, and officials said yesterday they expected an apology from Washington.
The releases came after two lengthy telephone calls between Dick Cheney, the vice president, and Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister.
Mr Erdogan told Mr Cheney he would not be able to contain the "serious resentment" of the Turkish public if the soldiers were not set free.
Details of events leading up to the raid remain unclear as the Bush administration failed to produce evidence substantiating the tip-off, apparently from Iraqi Kurdish officials, that the Turks had been plotting with a local ethnic Turkish militia, the Turcomen Front.
"I do not know what the intelligence was but it is totally unacceptable that intelligence be investigated in this manner," Gen Ozkok said.
Relations between the two countries have been shaky at best since March when Turkey's parliament rejected a bill that would have allowed thousands of US troops to launch a second, northern front against Saddam Hussein.
The Bush administration has leveled much of the blame against Turkey's generals for failing to using their clout to bully parliament into authorising the deployment of US troops.
Friday's raids are widely seen by an increasingly anti-American Turkish public as an attempt to punish the Turkish army for its lack of co-operation.
There were reports of a nine mile queue of traffic at Turkey's border gate with northern Iraq - a major transit point for coalition supplies and aid deliveries - after it was closed on Friday in apparent retaliation for the raid.
There are about 2,000 Turkish troops in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq, part of a force in the region since the end of the 1991 Gulf war to hunt down separatist Turkish Kurd rebels.
• CIA officials said yesterday that they believe Saddam's voice was on the recently released audiotape that warned of more bloodshed in Iraq and urged Iraqis to support resistance to American forces.
2 posted on 3/6/02 7:30 AM Pacific by grammymoon:
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Nah, make them disappear.
Come to think of it, we need a 'Doug Henning Squad'.
Men who can make anything disappear, forever.
They are there at our indulgence now and have no right other than the acquiesance of both the Kurds and ourselves.
Let's let the existing ruling structure in Northern Iraq make this determination.
We've already got one in Uzbeckistan.
Uzbekistan is a Turkic-speaking nation with strong cultural links to Turkey - as are most of the Central Asian states. Those bases are meant to irritate Russia, not Turkey.
I say we just reassure the Turks we won't carve out an independent Kurdistan from Iraq, fully in control of the Kirkuk area's oilfields. But if they want continued free access for their troops to hunt down suspected separatists, tough! We now reserve the right to sort out the separatists from the general Kurdish population - and we'll deal with them our way.
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