Agence France-Presse,
ANKARA (AFP): Turkey on Tuesday threatened a military incursion in northern Iraq as part of stepped up measures against Kurdish rebel bases there following the deaths of 15 soldiers in weekend attacks.
The government said in a statement that it had given orders allowing for all legal, economic and political measures, “including a cross-border operation if necessary,” against a “terrorist organisation in a neighbouring country”.
The statement was taken to refer to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) presence in Iraq.
Earlier, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had met senior government and military officials to discuss tougher action against the PKK after the rebels killed 15 soldiers in weekend attacks. The group is listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community.
Ankara says the PKK enjoys free movement in northern Iraq and obtains weapons and explosives there for attacks across the border.
It has also accused Iraqi Kurds of tolerating and even supporting the rebels.
The government has forwarded to parliament a proposal to authorise such a venture, the CNN-Turk television channel reported, adding that it was currently under consideration.
Spontaneous demonstrations were meanwhile held Wednesday across various Turkish cities in support of incursions.
The Turkish military has long sought authorisation to strike against PKK bases in northern Iraq but Ankara has held back pressure from the United States. Washington does not want its Iraqi Kurdish allies forced into confrontation with the Turkish army.
Turkey and Iraq signed an accord last month to combat the PKK but failed to agree on a clause allowing Turkish troops to engage in “hot pursuit” against rebels fleeing into Iraqi territory, as they did regularly in the 1990s.
Washington meanwhile immediately issued a warning to Ankara.
“I am not sure that unilateral incursions are the way to go, the way to resolve the issue,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington.
“We have counseled them both in public and private for many, many months (on) the idea that it is important to work cooperatively to resolve this issue,” McCormack added.
Many observers here doubt whether the embattled Baghdad government, which has virtually no authority in northern Iraq, can cajole the Iraqi Kurds into action against the PKK.
The group's 23-year armed campaign for self-rule in southeast Turkey has left more than 37,000 dead.
A PKK ambush on Saturday killed 13 soldiers in southeast Sirnak province bordering Iraq, the worst losses the army has suffered against the rebels since 1995.
Another soldier was killed in a clash with the rebels Saturday and one early Monday in a remote-controlled landmine explosion.
The attacks followed the killing of 12 people, mostly civilians but including anti-PKK Kurdish “Village Guard” militia, in an ambush on a minibus in Sirnak on September 29.
Tuesday's government statement said rising PKK violence was due to a series of economic, social and political measures that had improved the living conditions of the country's sizeable Kurdish community, leading the PKK “to lose popular support” in the southeast.
Under European Union pressure, Turkey has in recent years broadened Kurdish cultural freedoms and lifted emergency rule in the southeast of the country.
The July 22 parliamentary elections saw Erdogan's Justice and Development Party considerably increase its support in the region at the expense of the country's main Kurdish political movement, the Democratic Society Party.
