Articles About Terrorist Activities

AFP

General Raymond Odierno, chief of American forces in Iraq, has visited Turkey to discuss plans to cooperate in fighting rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the US military said on Saturday.

Odierno met Turkish General Hasan Igsiz, deputy chief of the Turkish General Staff, on Friday, the statement said. Their talks focused on continued assistance by US forces to Turkey in Ankara’s efforts to battle the PKK.

“The PKK is a terrorist organisation and has committed heinous crimes against the Turkish people,” the statement quoted Odierno as saying.

“I’m committed to work with the government of Turkey and the government of Iraq to prevent further atrocities.”

A series of PKK attacks over the past month killed dozens of Turkish soldiers and civilians, sparking public outcry and pledges from Turkish leaders to deal with the group, it said.

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Agence France Presse

Finnish police said Wednesday they had arrested five men on suspicion of trying to set fire to the Turkish Embassy in Helsinki.

“We have now arrested five people connected with this case. This afternoon we detained the fifth person,” Helsinki police chief inspector Markku Stenberg told Agence France-Presse.

The door of the embassy building was set ablaze with flammable liquid in the early hours of Tuesday. The fire was quickly detected by a police patrol and extinguished, but one embassy worker was hospitalized with injuries.

Stenberg said those arrested were aged 16 to 20 and were all of Turkish origin. At least some were Kurds.

“We have continued interrogations today. It has become clearer how it all happened. But I will not comment possible motives,” he said.

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Asia Times

Tensions between Iraqi Kurds and the government are on the rise, raising fears of ethnic clashes just as the country begins to recover from years of sectarian violence between Shi’ite and Sunni Arabs.

The Iraqi army last month deployed units to areas under Kurdish control in the volatile northern Diyala province, as part of its “Operation Good Tidings”, which has been launched to expand government authority over the area.

The centerpiece of the controversial move was Khanaqin, 140 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, a small, largely Kurdish town that has oil reserves and is close to the Iranian border. Kurdish security forces, known as the Peshmarga, left their bases in the nearby districts of Jalawla, Saadiya and Qara Tapa in northern Diyala after receiving warnings from the Iraqi army.

In a hasty face-saving move, Iraqi and Kurdish officials tentatively agreed that neither Peshmarga nor Iraqi troops would go to the town. But to the Kurds’ advantage, the predominantly Kurdish police force was told it could remain in charge of security.

Kurds see the deployment as a test of their power and believe if they withdraw from Khanaqin, the Iraqi army will chase them out of other strategic, and contested, locations in and around the oil-rich Kirkuk and Mosul in northern Iraq.

“The current problem is over borders, because they [the Iraqi government] believe the borders of [autonomous] Kurdistan should be where the former ousted regime [of president Saddam Hussein] were,” said Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, in a meeting with Kurdish journalists on September 28.

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AlterNet

A dispute over territory is raising fears that of ethnic clashes between Kurds and Arabs.

Tensions between Kurds and the Iraqi government over disputed territory have heightened recently, raising fears that they might lead to ethnic clashes between Kurds and Arabs at a time when the war-torn country is slowly recovering from years of sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Arabs.

Last month, the Iraqi Army deployed units to areas under Kurdish control in volatile northern Diyala Province, as part of its “Operation Good Tidings” to expand government authority over the area.

The center of the controversial move was Khanaqin, 140 kilometers northeast of Baghdad. It is a small, largely Kurdish town that has oil reserves and is close to the Iranian border. Kurdish Peshmarga troops left their bases in the nearby districts of Jalawla, Saadiya and Qara Tapa in northern Diyala after receiving warnings from the Iraqi Army.

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By Philipp Wittrock in Berlin, Spiegel Online

While the PKK concentrates on non-violent activities and propaganda work in Germany and Europe, in Turkey it is involved in a violent struggle for an autonomous Kurdish homeland. The kidnapping of three German tourists has put the issue firmly back on the political agenda in Berlin.

“Germany has declared war on the PKK. We can fight back. Every Kurd is a potential suicide bomber.” These combative words were spoken by Abdullah Öcalan, head of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) back in 1996, three years after the group had been banned in Germany.

Öcalan soon watered down his statement: The PKK only wanted to fight Turks in Germany, not Germans, he said. Nevertheless the banning of the Kurdish separatist group was still interpreted as a declaration of war. It was a sign that Berlin had chosen Turkey’s side in the Kurdish conflict that had been raging since the early 1980s.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN)

Turkey and Iraq signed an agreement Thursday that tightens and streamlines their working relationship in a range of areas, including the volatile issue of border security and the promise of a fruitful trade relationship.

 The signing comes as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan begins a two-day visit to Iraq, which Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called historic.

The two signed a joint political declaration on the establishment of a “high-level strategic cooperation council” between the governments that will help forge a “long-term strategic partnership” and then spoke to reporters.

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Berlin, Agence France Presse

Germany, on Tuesday, banned the broadcasting of a Kurdish television station within its borders because it would be regarded as promotion of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said. He also said the Danish-based, Roj TV was a PKK “mouthpiece” and ordered the closure of a production house that supplies the channel with programming.

Source: www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=108202

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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