And CUI BONO?
Only ONE shitstink state!
"Kurds rally against cross-border attacks" by Yahya Barzanji/Associated Press October 18, 2007
IRBIL, Iraq - Thousands of Kurds joined rallies across northern Iraq and marched to U.N. offices Thursday to protest a vote by Turkey's lawmakers that backed possible cross-border attacks against Kurdish rebel camps.
"No to military action. Yes to dialogue,'' demonstrators shouted as more than 5,000 people headed to U.N. offices in Dahuk near the Turkish border.
Protesters delivered a document calling for U.N. intervention to stop any further incursions into Iraq by Turkey - which has sent troops across the border several times in past decades to chase the Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK.
In Irbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdish region, children in school uniforms and other protesters waved banners in Kurdish and English: "Understanding each other is better than killing each other.''
The rallies also tapped into Kurdish solidarity for a people spread across several borders in the region, including Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Some protesters brandished the sunshine-crested flag of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region and joined in pro-Kurdish slogans and songs.
[And CUI BONO?
WHO wants to break up the Middle East Muslim states?]
Evan Dosky, a 26-year-old university student:
"We in our country have done nothing against neighboring Turkey and we will not allow that our dignity be violated.''
The PKK has long maintained hideouts along the rugged Iraq-Turkey border during its 23-year separatist campaign, which has left an estimated 37,000 people dead.
[Mostly Kurds!
Isn't it weird how Turkey can massacre its Kurds, and that's O.K.
But when Saddam does it, it's a problem?
Any trouble with the arbitrariness of it?]
And check out this ed by the Boston Globe.
Do me a favor, reader.
Substitute U.S. every time it says Turkey, and replace Kurds with Iraq.
See you on the other side.
"Turkish threats" Boston Globe editorial October 19, 2007
A DANGEROUS dynamic was set in motion Wednesday with the vote of Turkey's Parliament to authorize a military operation in the Kurdish region of Iraq against the guerrilla band of Turkish Kurds known as the PKK. If Turkish leaders do not heed pleas for restraint from NATO, President Bush, the Iraqi Kurds, and Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki - if they send troops into northern Iraq as they did several times in the 1980s and '90s - they could ignite a conflagration that would burn Turkey as well, scuttling its bid for entry into the European Union.
[For some reason, October 2002 keeps popping into my head]
Since the early 1980s, PKK violence has waxed and waned. After a few years of relative quiet, there has been a recent upsurge of attacks in the Kurdish area of southeastern Turkey. This month 31 people were killed, among them 13 Turkish military commandos and several civilians on a bus.
Whether or not these attacks were actually perpetrated by PKK forces coming from Iraqi Kurdistan, they have provoked public fury in Turkey and a demand for forceful action from the Turkish military. Fearful of losing ever more of their power and prerogatives to the neo-Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's military and intelligence chiefs - whom Turks commonly refer to as the "deep state" - are using anger over PKK terrorism to shift the domestic balance of power back toward themselves.
[And CUI BONO, readers?
Like the Turkish military and intelligence are BENEFITING from Kurdish "terrorism," huh?
Oh, STINK!!!!]
A Turkish invasion of Iraq, however, would establish a perilous precedent. Iraq's other neighbors would be all too likely to regard such an overt violation of Iraq's sovereignty as a convenient excuse to follow suit whenever it suited their own national interests.
[And WHO WAS the FIRST to "establish the precedent," you scum-fucks?
I'm gagging on the EXCEPTIONALISM and BLINDNESS exuding from the Globe's craphole!]
Iran is already lobbing shells into Iraq, to punish Iranian Kurds who mount attacks inside Iran and retreat into northern Iraq. Syria's president, Bashar Assad, who was visiting Turkey when the Parliament voted, was all too eager to back Turkey's right to invade Iraq. Both Iran and Syria have restive Kurdish minorities, and both share Turkey's paranoia about Kurdish aspirations for independence.
[Yeah, the fact that is a position Iran and Syria would support means we have to be against the move.
Let's face it, readers?
The U.S. MSM does Zionist bidding.
Hence this "editorial."]
Turkey cannot solve its problem with the PKK by military means. Turkish incursions in 1995 and 1997 - with 35,000 troops the first time and 50,000 the second - failed to eliminate the PKK fighters from their mountain redoubts. A small-scale operation could do little more than send a symbolic message and cause PKK guerrillas to melt into the local population. Another large-scale invasion would risk a confrontation with the potent Iraqi Kurdish military known as pesh mergas, destabilizing the one region of Iraq that is relatively peaceful and prosperous.
[Do they even bother to smell their own shit?
This gets galling after a while, readers]
Turkey would do better to offer an amnesty to PKK fighters, giving them an incentive to return home and pursue Kurdish interests by entering the peaceful political arena. That is the one option that will not do more harm than good to Turkey's true national interests.
[Where were you guys in 2002?
Oh, that's right. YOU SUPPORTED the INVASION of IRAQ, that's right!
Wanna make up for it?
STOP the WAR on IRAN!!
STOP doing NaZionist bidding!!!]
Here's more on the Kurds and the protests:
"Turkish Bid to Pursue Kurds Poses Quandary for Iraq" by ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, Oct. 18 — Turkey’s decision to allow the dispatch of troops over Iraq’s border in pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas throws into relief a troubling quandary for Iraq’s leaders.
On one hand, Iraq wants a cordial relationship with Turkey, a powerhouse in the region and a counterweight to the competing pulls of Iran and Saudi Arabia.
But Iraq has been able to do little to halt the rebel group’s activities because Iraq’s central government must rely on its ethnic Kurdish minority, which populates the region where the guerrillas are active, to take a stand against them.
Another factor complicating matters for the Iraqi government is that the Qandil mountains of the border region with Turkey are among the most rugged areas in the Middle East, and the area has never been fully under any government control.
Iraq’s Kurdish region has been semi-autonomous since 1991 and controls its own armed forces, which also patrol the border with Turkey. All ethnic Kurds, they are reluctant to fight the rebels because it means fighting brother Kurds, with whom they are generally sympathetic.
The guerrillas are ethnic Kurds who come primarily from Turkey and speak Turkish. The rebel group, known by its Turkish initials P.K.K., has an estimated 3,000 fighters in the mountains of northwest Iraq, from which they carry out attacks on Turkey. In the past, the rebel group has aspired to have an autonomous state in Turkey, though it is unclear exactly what the group’s demands are now.
While the Kurds in northern Iraq are not thought to participate in the activities of the Turkish rebel group, neither have they sought vigorously to eradicate the rebels — in part because it would be tantamount to going after their own.
Rebwar Karem, 31, a student at Sulaimaniya University on Thursday:
“The P.K.K. members are Kurds just as we are. The state of Turkey hates the Kurds so while we don’t respect the armed struggle of the Kurds in Turkey, I’m against anyone who orders them to leave [the Kurdish area of Iraq]."
At a protest on Thursday in Erbil, marchers carried signs that swore allegiance to Kurds, wherever they might be in the region. “Kurdistan is one and all Kurds are pesh merga,” said one sign, a reference to Kurdish fighters.
In a statement on Wednesday the Kurdistan Regional Government affirmed its opposition to the rebel group’s violent acts but warned Turkey not to tell the Kurds how to run their affairs:
“We do not interfere in the internal affairs of Turkey, and we expect the same in return. [The regional government] condemns the killing of innocent people in Turkey and does not believe that violence solves any problem.”
Western officials say that neither Iraq’s Kurds nor the central government has much of an incentive to act vigorously against the guerrillas.
An American official who is familiar with the region, but who refused to be quoted by name because he is not authorized to speak publicly about the issue;
“The Iraqi government would like P.K.K. to go away, but when you’re in Baghdad, that stuff seems very far away. As for the Kurdistan Regional Government, I don’t get any sense of fondness in domestic Kurdish politics for the P.K.K., but the idea of taking action against fellow Kurds is anathema.”
The official added that the Kurdistan Regional Government looked at the situation pragmatically. The Iraqi Kurds have other concerns, like attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents, especially in places like the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, where there is a struggle for control.
The official:
“The P.K.K. isn’t the first thing that come to their mind. It’s the bombings in Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk and their argument is, ‘Yes the P.K.K. is killing Turks, but are they an existential threat to Turkey? No. Are they going to bring down the Turkish government? No.’”
None of that, however, is much comfort to the Turks. Several thousand have died since the early 1980s when the rebel group was formed. The latest rebel attack in Turkey on Oct. 7 killed 13 Turkish soldiers. A measure of Kurdish reluctance in northern Iraq to judge fellow Kurds is that several Kurds explained in interviews that killing Turkish soldiers was a defensible action.
An Iraqi official who is an ethnic Kurd and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was expressing a personal opinion:
“The P.K.K. is killing Turkish soldiers in Kurdish villages. I hate to imagine what Turkish soldiers would do in a Kurdish village. Many Kurds would see that as an act of self-defense.”
The official Iraqi position is far more modulated. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has called for talks with Turkey, and Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi traveled to Istanbul on Wednesday to extend an olive branch to the Turks. In an interview broadcast on several Iraqi television stations late on Thursday, the country’s foreign minister, who happens to be a Kurd, used carefully diplomatic language.
Hoshyar Zebari, in a brief interview:
“The P.K.K. should leave Iraq. The Iraqi government is uncomfortable with the decision of the Turkish government to send troops to northern Iraq.”
Mr. Zebari, like many Iraqi Kurds, finds himself with divided loyalties. While the Kurds of northern Iraq have thrown in their lot with the country’s central government and say they want to be part of a united Iraqi state, their loyalty to fellow Kurds runs deep — and not without reason. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, an estimated 500,000 Kurds fled over the border to Turkey (a similar number fled to Iran) and found refuge among Turkey’s Kurdish minority.
Hundreds of years of history further bolsters the Iraqi Kurds’ position. The Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East and its members now live primarily in Iraq, Turkey and Iran, with a small number in Syria. Primarily mountain dwellers, they have their own language, customs, music and native dress. Despite their numbers, they have never had their own country and that reality irks many Kurds to this day, especially in the Kurdish area of Iraq."
[In other words, they have been shat on forever!]
"Security Contractors Shoot at Taxi, Wounding 3 Iraqis" by ANDREW E. KRAMER
BAGHDAD, Oct. 18 — Also on Thursday, thousands of Kurds marched in cities in northern Iraq to protest a decision by Turkey’s Parliament to authorize military incursions against Kurdish separatist rebel bases in Iraq, a threat that could introduce a new military dimension to the Iraq war in the country’s north.
About 12,000 people marched in the cities of Erbil and Dahok, calling on the semiautonomous government in the Kurdish region to resist any Turkish military attacks. Marchers also expressed solidarity with the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and many European countries.
Jara Rikani, a high school student at the march in Dahok:
“We defend Kurdistan with our souls, and I won’t allow the Turkish troops to stain our beloved land.”
The popular support among Kurds for the Workers’ Party makes this multisided standoff in northern Iraq even more fraught. If Turkey attacked, the situation would pose a quandary for the United States.
The United States formally opposes the rebel group, but taking action against it would alienate the Kurds, who are America’s natural allies in Iraq. Yet Turkey is an American ally in NATO, and much of the air cargo for the American war effort in Iraq passes through Turkey. The dominant ground forces in the Iraqi Kurdish region are an irregular militia, the pesh merga; the United States controls the airspace.
The stated position of the regional government is that the rebel group should not use Kurdish territory as a staging area for attacks into Turkey, but the government has said the rebel bases are in areas beyond its control.
According to the Turkish military, between 2,800 and 3,100 rebels from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party operate from bases along the mountainous border."
[Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but Turkey WILL INVADE at some point.
Just great, George!]
