Posted on 12/17/2007 11:46:27 PM PST by HAL9000
300 TURKISH TROOPS ENTER NORTHERN IRAQ OVERNIGHT -SENIOR IRAQI MILITARY SOURCE
This is a Marxist PKK issue. As noted elsewhere we consider the PKK terrorists as do the European nations.
Even after the destruction of the Marxist PKK there is no guarantee that Kurdistan meddling in eastern Turkey won't one day lead to war. That's another matter.
...with a knife blade.
Maybe they just wanted to get some steaks at the local Sizzler.
Does Turkey have any problem with the Kurds in the eastern part of Turkey. Is there any armed resisitance to the Turk government?
Well. Would you rather have a full-scale war between Turkey and ALL of the Kurds? Or just some pinprick raids with a NATO ALLY -against- a COMMUNIST Kurdish seperatist group, which, if successful, would break off part of Northern Iraq and Turkey to create a COMMUNIST MUSLIM STATE?
As Bush has learned, and the DIms haven't. We have only bad or worse choices in the middle east, and we can't choose to ignore them.
“Let’s see if the Kurdish civilians will resist the Islamofascist Turks invading Iraq.”
What crock. Who are all the lefties posting this garbage? America already told the Turks we would help them locate the PPK, Iraq already agreed to look the other way.
Despite what you read in the media, this is a waste of band width.
300 turks sitting on a dozen mountain tops looking out for invading PPK guerillas. BIG DEAL!
You hope the Kurds armed and supplied? YOU DO NOT HAVE A CLUE WHO THESE PEOPLE (the Kurdish PPK) ARE DO YOU?
The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization internationally by a number of states and organizations, including the USA, NATO and the EU.[2]
Eric Rouleau in the November/December 2000 edition of ‘Foreign Affairs’ states:
According to the Turkish Ministry of Justice, in addition to the 35,000 people killed in military campaigns, 17,500 were assassinated between 1984, when the conflict began, and 1998. An additional 1,000 people were reportedly assassinated in the first nine months of 1999. According to the Turkish press, the authors of these crimes, none of whom have been arrested, belong to groups of mercenaries working either directly or indirectly for the security agencies.[3][4]
Human Rights Watch has stated that:
Consequently, all economic, political, military, social and cultural organizations, institutions, formations — and those who serve in them — have become targets. The entire country has become a battlefield.
The PKK also promised to “liquidate” or “eliminate” political parties, “imperialist” cultural and educational institutions, legislative and representative bodies, and “all local collaborators and agents working for the Republic of Turkey in Kurdistan.”[5]
It also notes that:
As Human Rights Watch has often reported and condemned, Turkish government forces have, in the course of the conflict with the PKK, also committed serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including torture, extrajudicial killings, and indiscriminate fire. We continue to demand that the Turkish government investigate and hold accountable those members of its security forces responsible for these violations. Nonetheless, under international law, the government abuses cannot under any circumstances be seen to justify or excuse those committed by Ocalan’s PKK.[5]
Many who died were unarmed civilians, caught in the middle between the PKK and security forces, targeted for attacks by both sides.[6]
According to Amnesty International, the PKK killed and tortured Kurdish peasants and its own members in the 1980s. A number of Kurds have been abducted and killed because they were suspected of being “collaborators” or “informers” and it was a common practice for the PKK to kill their whole families.[7]
According to an article printed in the November 2002 issue of the International Socialist, monthly paper of the International Socialists, during the conflict (and still [as of 2002]), the Turkish army tortured, killed and “disappeared” civilians.[8] In 1997, Amnesty International (AI) reported that, “’Disappearances’ and extrajudicial executions have emerged as new and disturbing patterns of human rights violations ...” by the Turkish state.[9] According to an earlier (1996) report of AI, “in January 1996 the [Turkish] government announced that the PKK had massacred 11 men near the remote village of Güçlükonak. Seven of the victims were members of the local village guard force. Independent investigations suggested that the massacre was the work of the security forces”.[10]
check this out-
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119794106110035599.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
Turkey’s Terror Problem Is Ours
By Michael Rubin
Wall Street Journal
December 18, 2007
Pg. 21
It’s been nearly two months since the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) sparked an international crisis with a major attack inside Turkey, and more than six weeks since President Bush promised Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Washington would aid Turkey’s fight against terrorism. Heady talk of intelligence sharing and cooperation followed and, indeed, may have been a factor in this weekend’s Turkish air strikes on PKK targets in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Yet at the same time the Bush administration — more precisely its increasingly assertive State Department — has embraced an ill-advised diplomatic strategy toward the PKK that will likely backfire on our long-standing NATO ally, and could serve to undermine what is left of President Bush’s “global war on terrorism.”
With 100,000 Turkish troops amassed alongside the Iraqi frontier, it is understandable that U.S. diplomats want to avert a military crisis. But, rather than take a zero-tolerance policy toward terrorism, the State Department is counseling Turkey to offer political concessions. On Dec. 13, for example, State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Dell Dailey said, “We have not looked at a military solution as the solution to the PKK. Our preference is a political solution,” both inside Iraqi Kurdistan and inside Turkey.
-snip-
At some point in the near future the Muslim parastate of Turkey will disintegrate...
bttt
“I know that since last month thousands of PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) members have crossed into Iran,” said Osman Ocalan, who spent 18 years fighting Turkish troops before abandoning the armed struggle in 2004. “At least a thousand crossed into Turkey,” he added. “Only a small number remain in Iraq.”
PKK camps, said Ocalan, are scattered in the remote region where the borders of Iraq, Iran and Turkey meet. “They are constantly moving from one country to the other. They don’t stay long in one place. “The aim is not to offer targets. They know that one should not face the Turks directly, but rather carry out specific guerrilla operations against them.”
http://kurdistanobserver.servehttp.com/Nov-2007/11-11-07-pkk-crossed-into-iran.html
My comment: PKK is infiltrated by operatives from the Iranian Quds Force and they are seeking protection in Iran.
Associated Press
November 30, 2007
KOI-SANJAQ, (Southern Kurdistan) (AP) - There’s word that Kurdish guerrilla fighting for autonomy from Turkey have left Iraqi Kurdistan and returned to their homeland in the past two weeks.
The brother of a guerrilla leader says members of the group known as PKK have been replaced by Iran-based guerrllia.
He said the Kurdish guerrilla were leaving “to ease the burden” on the Kurdistan regional government, which is under pressure from its U.S. supporters, Iraq’s central government and Turkey to move against the PKK forces.
Relations between Iraq and Turkey have grown increasingly strained in recent months over a Turkish threat of a cross-border incursion against the PKK.
http://kurdistanobserver.servehttp.com/Nov-2007/30-11-07-pkk-leaves-skurdistan.html
Obviously the answer to that would be no, definitely not. Especially if you throw the whole communist element in there... You see, the MSM, doesn’t quite reveal that particular fact in all of their writings on the issue. But, then that’s not really a surprise now is it? :)
I’ve gotten somewhat of a crash-course in this whole situation since reading the thread last night. And, you’re right on when you say the choices are between bad and worse... I don’t envy Bush, nor our military trying to figure out all these little nuances, either... At least they’ve got much better information to work from than those of us in the general public! ;)
Leave it to the MSM to omit information... Thank you so much for the pings to the other articles and taking the time to help educate me. I do remember about the PKK so this does make more sense today than it did last night! (It was probably too late at night for me to be posting anyway! LOL)
That's what I think tells the story about the MSM, about the Dims, frankly, about anyone I see with a "Peace not War" bumper sticker.
It tells me that they assume there is a good and a bad answer. When in fact, true leadership is about being able to make the best decision out of many imperfect options, with inadequate information.
If the answers were so damn obvious, then anyone could be president.
Oh good, at least I’m not the only one!! ;)
LOL. The latest article on Yahoo has the Turks moving out according to the Kurds. Have not read the article, just paraphrasing the headlines.
This old NY Times article (written in nytimese) states that the Kurdish of the area have had the hardest time in Turkey -- this after reporting on the slaughter and gassing done by Saddam in Iraq. Go figure. Well I told you that the article was written in nytimese.
Nonetheless, the 1989 article states "it has become somewhat chic for Turkish politicians to acknowledge having Kurdish ancestors. Even the newly elected President, former Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, has done so."
"Baghdad has also been willing to grant the Kurdish northeast a measure of autonomy, even if not nearly as much as demanded by rival guerrilla bands led by Massoud Barzani and Jalil Talabani."
That's interesting because both Barzani and Talabani are key government leaders in today's Iraq and both were leaders of the Kurds' KDP and PUK parties when the two parties fought each other in the late 1990s.
"Turkish commentators and foreign diplomats say, official tolerance for greater Kurdish liberty will be limited by security concerns presented by the Government's five-year-old war against separatist guerrillas." That would be the Marxist PKK terrorists "recruited in Syria and not in Kurdish zones in Turkey. Their main training camp, official say, has been moved in the last year or so to the Bekaa, Lebanon's eastern valley."
Turkey worked out an agreement with Syria and Syria's support for the PKK ended (in 1998, I believe). About the only place left for the PKK was the "no man's land" in the mountians along Turkey's border with Iraq. Iran has its own brand of PKK to deal with, BTW. In fact, there was a Kurdish uprising against Iran during the 1979 Iranian revolution.
RE: "Is there any armed resisitance to the Turk government?"
"Turkish officials, opposition leaders and foreign analysts alike all agree that the guerrillas, with their Marxist ideology, have made little headway in a Kurdish population made up overwhelmingly of Sunni Muslims. Independence from Turkey is the goal of a tiny minority, they say, and what Kurds essentially want is more prosperity and some 'cultural autonomy.'"
That was twenty years ago. Turkey had just started pouring billions of dollars into the area to bring up the living standards and opportunities.
PKK was founded (some say with USSR help) by Abdullah Ocalan. He was captured, tried and convicted in the late 1990s. The PKK renamed KADEK (I read somewhere) has for some reason lately become deadly again.
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