Word: turkishly
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...stake. In the short term, Turkey wants a firm commitment from Washington to help rein in a Kurdish guerrilla group that has stepped up attacks on Turkish security forces, apparently from bases in Iraq, leaving more than 40 dead in October alone. Turkey believes the group, known as the PKK, or Kurdistan Worker's Party, represents as serious a threat to Turkey's existence as Washington says al-Qaeda does to America's. The group has bases in northern Iraq, and Turkey has been urging the U.S. in vain to help clean out those bases since U.S. troops arrived...
...troops across the border in pursuit of the PKK, an outcome that the U.S. wants to avoid not only because Iraq is ostensibly America's ally as well but because the Iraqi Kurds are that war-torn nation's only economic success story. Any large-scale movement of Turkish troops into Iraq raises the chances of a clash not just with the PKK but with Iraqi Kurdish soldiers...
...brutality of the killings has produced an outpouring of anger in Turkey. Flag-waving students, some in school uniforms, mourned fallen soldiers in a nationwide funeral that spread across 11 provinces. Turkish lawmakers passed a resolution authorizing the military to invade Iraq and hunt down the militant group blamed for the attacks, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. Turkish troops have massed at the border; the U.S., meanwhile, has pressed Turkey to show restraint and Iraqi leaders to rein in the PKK. In response, Iraq President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said the local government would not turn over any Kurds...
...Fortunately, the Iraqi Kurdish problem is fixable. For a start, Jalal Talabani will have to stop acting like a Kurdish national resistance leader and more like a President. What he has to do is kick the Turkish Workers' Party, the PKK, out of Iraq. I am told it would be fairly easy because most of the PKK's fighters operate from within Turkey rather than Iraq...
...done. We do not have the forces to patrol the border between Iraq and Turkey. It would take at least another hundred thousand troops. We have little or no political leverage over Talabani, who on occasion has told interlocutors that the Turkish General Staff is funding the PKK - presumably to unbalance Turkish democracy and justify a coup d'etat. It's nonsense, of course, but demonstrates that Talabani is still not ready to confront...