Word: iraqi
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Even on a normal day, Ibrahim Khalil, the complex straddling Turkey and Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, is a rather unusual international border crossing. Although it is an entry point into Iraq, there are no Iraqi soldiers, no Iraqi flags, and seemingly no Iraqi federal officials. Instead, the Iraqi side is controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government, which enforces its own customs and immigration policies, enforced at checkpoints manned by Kurdish peshmerga fighters under the flag of Kurdistan - a red, white, and green tricolor with a golden...
...Viewed from Turkey, these trappings of autonomy are a worrying prelude to an independent Kurdish state, a prospect to which Turkey - with its own restive Kurdish minority - is implacably hostile. Turkish soldiers often harass Kurds crossing at Ibrahim Khalil, according to Iraqi Kurdish border security officials. They confiscate books or documents that use the word "Kurdistan", deny passage to women called Kurdistan - a common female first name - and to Kurds of foreign nationality whose passports list "Kurdistan" as a place of birth...
...Turkey's latent hostility towards Iraqi Kurdistan has grown more active following last month's killings of about 40 Turks, mostly soldiers, by fighters of the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, a militant group of Turkish Kurds at war with the Turkish state (and branded a terrorist organization by the U.S. and EU). Turkey accuses Iraqi Kurdish leaders of allowing the PKK to maintain bases in northern Iraq as part of a greater Kurdish national agenda. (Iraqi Kurds say they are helpless against a hardened guerilla group that Turkey itself has failed to defeat in over 20 years...
...agreement with Saddam Hussein after the American no-flight zone created a power vacuum in the region during the 1990s. In the town of Barmani, the Turks have a base with 35 tanks, and are repairing a disused air strip and building up troop levels, according to Iraqi Kurdish intelligence officers. But this is no invasion: The Turks supply and man these stations simply by sending uniformed soldiers through the Ibrahim Khalil border on buses...
...this contest, Turkey needs U.S. support to weigh in with Iraqi Kurds. Ridding the region of the PKK may sound like a difficult task, but starting a dialogue between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurdish leaders that would lead to peaceful cohabitation in the region will prove more difficult still. With reporting by Pelin Turgut/Istanbul