Word: turkeys
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...over; the battle for Kirkuk may be just beginning - and it may put the United States on a collision course not with Saddam Hussein holdouts, but two of its key allies. Iraqi Kurds are cheering the arrival of their guerrilla fighters in Kirkuk Thursday, and the same news has Turkey's leaders confronting their worst nightmare about the war next door. The U.S. had promised Turkey that the Kurdish fighters would be kept out of the northern oil town, and that, indeed, had been Washington's orders to the guerrillas working with U.S. Special Forces to confront Saddam's northern...
...Iraq's Kurds and Turkey, the northern oil town has always been the key prize in the battle to overthrow Saddam. It was their desire to prevent the Kurds capturing Kirkuk and the other key northern oil town, Mosul, that led Turkey to demand that the U.S. agree to the deployment of tens of thousands of Turkish troops in northern Iraq. Failure to reach such an agreement was a significant factor contributing to Turkey's refusal to grant permission for the U.S. to launch a ground invasion from its territory. But Turkey has since been cooperating with...
...counter the ambitions of Iraq's Kurdish nationalists - although the Kurdish parties that have governed the section of northern Iraq liberated from Baghdad in 1991 officially deny they plan to seek an independent state, that goal has long been an organizing principle of local Kurdish politics. And Turkey, fearful that even formalized Kurdish autonomy in Iraq would stoke secessionist passions among its own Kurdish minority, has threatened to send its own troops into the region to keep a lid on Kurdish ambitions during the breaking down of the Saddam order, and to disarm the Kurdish militias...
...state. More immediately, Kurdish officials have reiterated the intention of tens of thousands of Kurds to return to the city after having been driven out under Saddam's policy of "forced Arabization," a program of ethnic cleansing designed to reinforce Baghdad's own claims on the city. But Turkey views Kirkuk as the rightful property of Iraq's tiny Turkman minority, which has close ties to Ankara and whose historic conflict with the Kurds has at times erupted in bloodshed...
...there's not much in the Turkish position for the Kurds to love. Their initial response to the suggestion of even a small Turkish buffer zone 15 miles inside Iraqi Kurdistan was to demand that Turkish troops there be placed under U.S. command - a demand rejected by Turkey, and which the U.S. has reportedly been forced by Ankara's resistance to drop. Kurdish leaders have warned that any Turkish troops in Iraqi Kurdistan would be regarded as invaders. In order to forestall the prospect for a clash between the Kurds and Turkey, the U.S. military may be inclined to seize...