U.S., Turkey to share intelligence on Kurdish rebel group
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The United States will help Iraq and Turkey crack down on Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq, President Bush said Monday after meeting with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Bush told reporters U.S. and Turkish commanders will share intelligence on the rebels.
With Turkey threatening to launch cross-border raids against the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, Bush pointed to the weekend release of eight Turkish soldiers captured by the rebels as evidence that a crackdown is under way.
I’ve assured the prime minister that we’re working very carefully and closely with people in the Kurdish part of Iraq to help deal with the movement of these people, to help locate and find and stop the leadership of the PKK from continuing doing what they’re doing, Bush said.
Erdogan told reporters his people are demanding action against the PKK, and that a solution to the border crisis must come in the shortest time possible.
Turkey has no patience left to deal with mechanisms which have been dragging over time, which were tried but did not yield any results, he said.
However, Erdogan was asked later at the National Press Club whether he was satisfied with what he heard from Bush. I’m happy, the prime minister said.
The United States and the European Union consider the PKK a terrorist organization, and Bush called it an enemy of Turkey, a free Iraq and the United States of America.
Bush said top U.S. and Turkish military officials have set up an arrangement to keep in touch with each other and with the U.S. commander in Baghdad, Gen. David Petraeus.
Good, sound intelligence, delivered on a real-time basis, using modern technology, will make it much easier to deal effectively with people who are using murder as a weapon to achieve political objectives, he said.
Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, has put tens of thousands of troops along the border with Iraq after a series of attacks by the PKK. Erdogan had said he would stay any decision on possible action until after his talks with Bush, which lasted nearly two hours.
The rebels have spent two decades fighting for an autonomous Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey. But Washington fears a Turkish incursion into northern Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish region could destabilize Iraq’s U.S.-backed government and jeopardize supply lines for more than 160,000 American troops in Iraq.
The crisis threatens to shake up Iraq’s Kurdish provinces, which largely have avoided the sectarian and insurgent warfare that has plagued the rest of the country over the past four years. Washington and Ankara are pressuring the Iraqi government and Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government to clamp down on the PKK, and some Kurdish authorities have taken some steps to defuse the standoff.
The Iraqi government helped secure the release of eight Turkish soldiers abducted by Kurdish rebels two weeks ago. The soldiers were handed over to Kurdistan regional government officials in northern Iraq on Sunday, and have returned to Turkey.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki vowed to close PKK offices and front businesses across the country. A Kurdish political party with ties to the rebels was shut down over the weekend, the state-run television network al-Iraqiya reported. Iraqi authorities have announced tighter controls at airports and border crossings, and suspected PKK members captured by the government will be tried in Iraqi courts on terrorist charges, al-Maliki said.
Nechirvan Barzani — the prime minister of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government — wrote Monday in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that the autonomous government welcomes the meeting between Bush and Erdogan and said the only solution to this decades-old problem lies in diplomacy.
The KRG is, and will remain, fully prepared to find a long-term solution to this problem, he said. We must discard the rhetoric of violence and recognize that a military response to the current crisis would be a disaster for everyone except the PKK.
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