Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Occupation Iraq: Turkish Front

The New York Times is really a load of crap this morning, readers.

This is all the shit that is fit to spew from the diarrhea-drivel NYT!


"4 Sunni Allies of U.S. Killed in Iraq" by DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD — Four members of an American-backed neighborhood watch group in Diyala Province were killed Wednesday when a house they were raiding exploded, the police said. The blast, north of Baquba, the provincial capital, also wounded at least four people."

"Turkish Jets Strike Kurdish Rebels" by SEBNEM ARSU

ISTANBUL — Turkish warplanes attacked Kurdish rebel camps in northern Iraq on Wednesday, the Turkish military said, acknowledging its second cross-border airstrike this week and its third in recent days.

The warplanes shelled eight locations in the Zap region of northern Iraq, across Turkey’s southeastern border, the army said in a statement. It gave no information on any casualties or injuries.

The latest raid occurred as Kurdish politicians in the Turkish Parliament renewed calls for a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the Kurdish separatist group called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., whose campaign has cost more than 30,000 lives since the 1980s.

The Turkish Kurds’ Democratic Society Party was the only group to vote against a measure that passed in October authorizing troops to be sent into northern Iraq to confront the rebels.

An American military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, said that efforts were being made to get accurate information, a difficult process:

We don’t have forces there that are the arbiters of the ground truth. The military unit conducting the operation is the Turkish forces, and they are, in this case, the arbiters of ground truth.”

According to Turkish media reports here, the locations attacked by the Turkish military were empty because the rebels retreated deeper into Iraqi territory in anticipation of the raids.

Ali Nihat Ozcan, a political analyst based in Ankara:

More than the mathematical results, the psychological results are important in this war of propaganda. There is an improvement in Turkish-American relations, which sends a strong message to the P.K.K. and, on the other hand, pleases and relaxes the Turkish public opinion.”

The P.K.K., which is estimated to have about 3,500 rebels active in the Iraqi mountains, has threatened retaliation against the Turkish military on some Kurdish Web sites.

A commander in the mountains was quoted as saying by the Firat News Agency on Monday:

Maybe during winter an appropriate response is not possible, but they shouldn’t forget that when leaves turn green, the dreams that the Turkish state has been dreaming will turn into a nightmare.”

In Istanbul, seven people were injured Tuesday when a bomb placed in a garbage bin exploded, the police said. No organization has yet claimed responsibility.

On Monday, about 7.5 pounds of explosives were found in an abandoned bag in Sisli, a busy Istanbul district. The police said they caught the owner of the bag, a young man, but no further information had been made public."

How much you wanna bet these incidents are blamed on the Kurds?

CUI BONO, readers?