Turkish troops will keep peace in Iraq, Premier Erdogan says

Ankara, US said to be at odds over where the contingent will be deployed

PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan (l) chats with Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul (r) prior to an AK meeting earlier this week. Erdogan warned that any attacks on Turkish troops in Iraq will be ‘unacceptable.’

ISTANBUL (AFP) - Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisted yesterday that Turkish troops would be deployed in Iraq to help restore stability, warning that any attacks on them would be “unacceptable.” “Turkish soldiers will go there not as a police or gendarmerie force. They will go there for peace and tranquility for the Iraqi people,” Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul.

“Hostile approaches toward soldiers... will be unacceptable,” he added.

Overriding vocal opposition from both the Iraqi leadership and from Turkish public opinion, Erdogan’s government Tuesday passed through Parliament a motion to dispatch troops to Iraq in response to a US request for assistance.

Iraqi leaders say they are against any military involvement by neighboring countries, while Iraqi Kurds are particularly hostile to the idea. But keen to spread the burden of reconstructing Iraq, Washington Wednesday vowed to press the US-appointed interim Iraqi Governing Council to accept the deployment of Turkish troops.

The Turkish Parliament authorized the dispatch of troops to Iraq for a maximum of one year, leaving the decision on the size, location and timing of the deployment to the government.

In Ankara, US Ambassador Eric Edelman met with the undersecretary of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Ugur Ziyal, in what was described as a preliminary discussion on how talks would proceed to finalize the Turkish deployment. “We cannot reveal details. The situation is very sensitive.”

“There are some circles that oppose Turkish soldiers and we have to avoid further reactions,” a Turkish diplomat said.

The mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper claimed yesterday that Turkey and the US were at odds on the issue of where the Turkish contingent would be deployed.

According to the daily, Washington was offering the al-Anbar province, a non-Kurdish Sunni region stretching from west of Baghdad to the borders with Syria and Jordan, while Ankara was asking for the Salahuddin region, which includes Saddam’s birthtown of Tikrit and is closer to Kurdish areas.

Iraqi Kurds, whose homeland in northern Iraq borders Turkey, are also opposed to Turkish soldiers crossing through their enclave and setting up logistical bases along the way.

Protesters, meanwhile, continued to hold demonstrations against sending troops to Iraq across Turkey. Eleven activists were detained in the southern city of Adana where clashes broke between security forces and demonstrators.