Will Turkey attack Northern Iraq ?

Many of the Kurds wish to have an independent Kurdish state, either in northern Iraq or Southern Turkey. Rebels (called PKK)trying to archive that aim, are hiding in the mountains of northern Iraq.

Turkey doesn't want an independent Kurdish State. Nor does Iran.

The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, NATO, the EU and Turkey. Washington opposes any major operation into north Iraq, which could destabilize the region. The US claims to be taking action against the PKK to appease Turkey, but actually most `coalition' troops are still bogged down in central Iraq dealing with the rebels there.

The Turkish military wants to attack the rebels in the Kurdish controlled northern Iraq. "It would be a catastrophe, very clearly...there are already enough people fighting in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan is one of the few places where things are still under control," Alain Deletroz of the International Crisis Group think-tank said in Brussels. Financial markets were rattled last week by reports of a major incursion into northern Iraq, which Turkey denied had happened. Military sources said there had been a limited raid.

To further complicate the situation the Islamic-rooted Turkish government and the staunchly secular military of Turkey are not on the same page. "Has the fight with the 5,000 terrorists finished domestically, that we should now be talking about Iraq?" asked Turkey's Prim Minister Tayyip Erdogan said when reporters asked him about a cross-border operation against separatist PKK rebels. Analysts said the threat of an incursion into northern Iraq was as much to do with domestic politics ahead of a July 22 national election as with security.






Before World War I, most Kurds lived within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire in the province of Kurdistan. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Allies agreed and planned to create several countries within its former boundaries. Originally Kurdistan, along with Armenia, was to be one of them, according to the never-ratified Treaty of Sèvres. However, the reconquest of these areas by Kemal Atatürk and other pressing issues caused the Allies to accept the renegotiated Treaty of Lausanne, accepting the border of modern Republic of Turkey and leaving the Kurds without a self-ruled region. Other Kurdish areas were assigned to the new British and French mandated states of Iraq and Syria under both treaties.

The Kurdish delegation made a proposal at the San Francisco Peace Conference in 1945, showing the geographical extent of Kurdistan as claimed by the Kurds. This proposal encompasses an area extending from the Mediterranean shores near Adana to the shores of Persian Gulf near Bushehr, and it includes the Lur inhabited areas of southern Zagros[10][11].

Since World War I, Kurdistan has been divided between several states,largest portions of the land being respectively in Turkey (43%) , Iran (31%), Iraq (18%), Syria (6%) and the former Soviet Union (2%), in all of which Kurds are minorities. At the end of the First Gulf War, Allies established the safe haven in northern Iraq. Amid the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from three northern provinces, Iraqi Kurdistan emerged as an autonomous entity inside Iraq, with its own local government and parliament in 1992.

Arab nations tell Saddam: go now and we avoid war | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

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Saudi plan for Iraq leader to go into exile


Jonathan Steele and Ewen MacAskill
Saturday January 18, 2003
The Guardian

The Saudi government is canvassing a plan to give Saddam Hussein a last-ditch chance to go into exile if the United Nations security council passes a new resolution authorising war against Iraq, western and Arab diplomats have confirmed.

Under the plan, Saudi Arabia would ask for a meeting of the Arab League to nominate a delegation to go to Baghdad and urge the Iraqi leader to avert war by leaving the country.

Arab diplomats have little hope that President Saddam will agree, and certainly not at the moment when he is assumed to believe the security council may yet step back from the brink - either because of divisions in its ranks or because weapons inspectors have found no "smoking gun" to prove he has violated earlier resolutions.

But they feel they must at least try to get him to give up, once the die is cast by the security council.

The plan is delicate because no Arab government is happy to promote "regime change" in a brother Arab nation.

The Saudi government said this week that it was preparing a new "initiative" but confirmed no details. "The Saudis do not want to make the details official but they have been leaking it," a western diplomat said yesterday.

"The concept is if you have a decision by the UN to go to war, give a chance for diplomacy to work before you go to war," the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al Faisal, told reporters in Riyadh.

Saddam Hussein has not left his country since the invasion of Kuwait more than 12 years ago, and few diplomats expect him to accept exile rather than go down fighting.

"I really doubt that Saddam would want exile. He's not the type to leave the country," a senior adviser to the government of one of Iraq's neighbours said this week.

Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, and Turkey's prime minister, Abdullah Gul, discussed the plan with Saudi Arabia's ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, in Riyadh this week. Refusing to go into details on the initiative, Crown Prince Abdullah told reporters he believed war would be avoided.

Saudi Arabia and other regional states will meet in Turkey next week for a final push to persuade President Saddam to cooperate with weapons inspectors. They will send a delegation to Baghdad and then to Washington, a senior Arab diplomat said.

News of the Saudi plan may have prompted the Iraqi leader to send his special envoy, Ali Hassan al-Majeed, a member of the revolutionary command council, yesterday on a tour of Arab capitals. A former general, Ali Hassan al-Majeed - sometimes dubbed "Chemical Ali" - was in charge of gas attacks on Iraqi Kurds at Halabja in 1988.

He began his sudden regional tour with a visit to Syria, the only Arab member of the security council. Majeed, a cousin of President Saddam, met President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. Later he told reporters any talk of exile for President Saddam in a sympathetic state was absurd.

Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, has also delivered messages from President Saddam to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco over the past week.

Saudi Arabia has become the unofficial Arab leader since it launched a Middle Eastern peace initiative last March. As the largest country in the Gulf and with internal tensions gradually rising, Saudi Arabia is more worried about regional stability than almost any other Arab state.

It fears an American-led war, whether or not it has UN backing, could cause heavy civilian casualties and radicalize Arab populations throughout the Middle East. It might also lead to the break-up of Iraq, and prompt Washington to move on to try to change the regime in Iran, as well as in states on the Arab side of the Gulf.

Its sudden burst of diplomacy around Iraq, starting with next week's meeting in Turkey, and the fall-back plan of urging the Iraqi leader to accept exile, reflect the deepening realization in Arab states that the United States has dispatched enough troops to make a decision for war imminent.

Speculative elaborations on the Saudi plan emerged yesterday but diplomats gave them little credence.

Time magazine said Saudi Arabia hoped to encourage Iraqi generals to overthrow the Iraqi leader and his clique.

The magazine said the Saudi proposal required a UN amnesty for the vast majority of Iraqi officials if they mounted a coup. It would extend to all but 100-120 of the most senior Baath party officials, including President Saddam, his close relatives and others in the ruling circle.

"If there is amnesty for the rest of the government, Saddam will be checkmated," Time quoted one diplomat as saying. The proposed amnesty would be conditional on cooperation in implementing UN resolutions on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

"I doubt whether the international community would give Saddam immunity. There are many others in his entourage who would also not get it," a western diplomat said yesterday.

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