Articles About Terrorist Activities

Bruce Fein, Washington Times

The United States is imploring Turkey to desist from invading northern Iraq to combat the PKK, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization that keenly relishes the slaughter of Turkish teachers, doctors, technicians, engineers, Kurdish village guards and police, and otherwise.

 Concurrently, the United States asserts its own right to invade the sovereignty of any country in pursuit of suspected international terrorists. Thereby hangs a tale of United States double standards and the failure of the State Department’s public diplomacy. A staggering 83 percent of Turks hold an unfavorable view of America. The corresponding figure in Germany is 66 percent.

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Andrew Purvis, Time.com

The visit by Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the White House on November 5 marks an important test of the relationship between America and its best ally in the Muslim world. In Erdogan, the U.S. has a friend who is that rarest of rarities: a democratically elected, democratically minded, economically liberal Islamist — an important bridge between the Muslim world and the secular West. The U.S. needs Erdogan as much as Erdogan needs Washington’s cooperation in a recent slew of crises.

A lot is at stake. In the short term, Turkey wants a firm commitment from Washington to help rein in a Kurdish guerrilla group that has stepped up attacks on Turkish security forces, apparently from bases in Iraq, leaving more than 40 dead in October alone. Turkey believes the group, known as the PKK, or Kurdistan Worker’s Party, represents as serious a threat to Turkey’s existence as Washington says al-Qaeda does to America’s. The group has bases in northern Iraq, and Turkey has been urging the U.S. in vain to help clean out those bases since U.S. troops arrived in 2003. In Washington, Erdogan will be seeking U.S. commitments, including military options, to address the PKK threat.

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Justin Raimondo, Voltairenet

Early last August – that is way before the subject was mentioned in mainstream media -, Thierry Meyssan revealed in our columns the project for a US-Turkey joint military intervention against the PKK. However, the Pentagon’s right hand ignoring what its left hand is doing, the plan was soon to face a new reality described here by Antiwar’s Justin Raimondo: the PKK itself is armed by the Pentagon!

The serial numbers of arms captured from PKK fighters have been traced back to U.S. shipments to Iraqi military and police units. Responding to Turkish complaints, the Americans claim these arms were diverted by the Iraqis – presumably the Kurdish regional government – but the Turks aren’t buying it: if the large quantity of U.S.-made arms (1,260 seized so far) turns out to have been directly provided to the PKK by the Americans, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul warned, U.S.-Turkish “relations would really break apart.” U.S. diplomats immediately rebuffed this suggestion, and Washington dispatched the Pentagon’s general counsel, William J. Haynes, to the scene, where he met with top Turkish military leaders. According to at least one report, “The meeting discussed an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Defense into reports that U.S. arms were being sold by U.S. troops in Iraq.”

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Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Newspapers, Ankara-Turkey

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday branded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party a “terrorist organization” and a “common enemy” of the United States, Turkey and Iraq, but she stopped short of committing Washington to military action against the guerrilla force.

Turkey has threatened to launch military operations against the group in Iraq alone if necessary, and Turkish officials indicated that they weren’t satisfied by what Rice told them in talks Friday.

“This is where the words end, and the action needs to start,” Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said. “Her words were good to hear, but words offer nothing new,” said another government official, who requested anonymity because he isn’t an authorized spokesman.

The Bush administration has assured Turkey at least four times that it would take action against the PKK, as it’s known in its Kurdish initials, but hasn’t done so, in part because there are no U.S. troops in Iraq available for such a mission.

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