NY Times: Turkish government takes risk

ANKARA (AA) – Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on Thursday brushed aside objections to his country’s decision to send thousands of soldiers to Iraq for the first time since Turkish troops were driven out of the former Ottoman territory in 1917.

"Turkish soldiers aren’t going there as a police or gendarme force," Mr. Erdogan told reporters when asked about Iraqi protests to the plan. "Negative approaches to soldiers who go for happiness and tranquillity can’t be accepted."

But Erdogan’s bravado belied the grave risks his government faces with its gesture to support the effort led by the United States in Iraq after spurning American requests for help before the war.

While Turkish troops would be the first from a Muslim country to join allied forces in Iraq, they will not necessarily be welcomed there. Members of the Iraqi Governing Council have said they do not want any Turkish troops on Iraqi soil.

Nor is there much support for the plan at home: at least two-thirds of Turks oppose the troop deployment according to several recent polls.

"We are going somewhere that we are not welcome," warned Inal Batu, a member of Parliament from the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, the country’s main opposition party. "There is an occupying force in Iraq, and if you send troops there, they will surely be a part of the existing occupying force."

On Tuesday, Parliament gave Mr. Erdogan’s government permission to decide whether to send troops for up to one year. But Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party will bear the blame if the deployment turns sour.

Turkish and American officials said the Turkish force could be from 6,000 to more than 10,000 and might arrive in Iraq as early as late November.

Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has the alliance’s second largest military with half a million troops. They have served in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Mr. Erdogan said Thursday that the country has soldiers in 26 countries.

Details of where and how the troops will be deployed in Iraq have yet to be negotiated by Turkish and American military officials. The American ambassador, Eric Edelman, met Thursday with the Turkish Foreign Ministry officials to set a timetable for the talks, which are expected to begin next week.

While Iraq is a predominantly Islamic country, most of its people are Shiite Muslims, who already feel shortchanged by decades under the thumb of the country’s Sunni Muslim minority. Turks are mostly Sunni and Iraqi Shiites began Wednesday demonstrating against the Turks’ planned presence in the country.

Mr. Erdogan’s government will be under pressure to show that it is getting something from the United States for its unpopular efforts. Last month, Washington granted Turkey an $8.5 billion loan in what many political analysts saw as an inducement to the troop commitment. But there are broad disagreements between what the Turks and the Americans want the troops to do.

At the crux of the disagreement lie the Iraqi Kurds, the country’s second largest ethnic group, who control the northern third of the country. The Americans need Kurdish support to maintain stability and build a postwar government.

Turkey has aggressively opposed Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq because of fears that it feeds separatist ambitions among the Kurds on the Turkish side of the border.

Last week, the United States agreed to help Turkey eliminate the remaining Turkish Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, about 4,000 of whom are believed to be living around Mount Qandil near the Turkish border. But Turkish officials stressed Thursday that the public needs to see some concrete American action.

Turkey wants to station troops around Turkmen enclaves near the northern city of Salahuddin, closer to its own border with Iraq and the Kurdish controlled areas there. It has long expressed a desire to protect the rights of the Turkmens, the third largest ethnic group in Iraq, with whom the Turks share an ethnic and linguistic heritage.

The Kurds, who maintain their own forces in the north, vehemently oppose any Turkish deployment in Iraq, particularly near Kurdish areas. They worry that Turkey will use its support for the Turkmens to weaken Kurdish autonomy in the north and control the region’s rich oil resources. The United States worries that putting the forces close to each other would lead to conflict.

American officials say they want the Turkish troops in western Iraq between Tikrit, Baghdad and the junction of the Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi borders. That is a predominantly Sunni region that has presented the Americans with some of the toughest resistance since the war officially ended in May.

But the Turkish press has called the area "the devil’s triangle" because of its concentration of Syrian interlopers and loyalists of Saddam Hussein and there is widespread concern that the troops there would bear the brunt of future fighting.

"Our soldiers will be deployed in the most violent parts of Iraq," Mr. Batu said.

A stream of returning casualties from Iraq, could weaken the Turkish government and hurt Mr. Erdogan’s party.