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Major Turkish Incursion in N. Iraq Seen as Unlikely
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The U.S. military has a small contingent in Iraq's Kurdish north and a limited view of activity along the northern border. A team of about a dozen U.S. soldiers works with the Iraqi border force in the Kurdish capital of Irbil and visits the outposts along the border; a U.S. Special Forces team also works in the area. On one trip, Special Forces Col. Johnny C. Strain, who leads the border transition team, saw a 1.5-mile-long airstrip with 18 Turkish tanks guarding it.
The team's intelligence officer, Sgt. 1st Class Jody Reynolds, said Turkish forces have been "mortaring fairly regularly" along the border and "conducting cross-border operations, in order to push back PKK elements or to retaliate."
"There are Iraqi Kurds who have been abandoning their homes" along the border, Reynolds said. "And with good reason. Who wants to live where they're going to be shelled?"
Within the past two weeks, a team of Turkish special forces soldiers wearing civilian clothes was stopped by Kurdish militiamen, known as pesh merga, at a checkpoint in Sulaymaniyah and asked for identification, an episode that worsened tensions between the two countries, Strain said.
"It just added to the fuel of what was already going on," he said.
Iraqi officials estimate that about 3,000 PKK members are in northern Iraq. The group controls some routes into the country and taxes passing vehicles to help finance its operations, U.S. officials said. One senior Iraqi security official said the United States needs to "pinch Barzani" to make him take a harder line against the rebels. The Iraqi border force does not have the power to stop Turkish troops from coming into Iraq or to keep rebels from pushing out to Turkey, the security official acknowledged.
"They only can write reports," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
To the U.S. military, having to take sides in an open fight inside Iraq between Turkey and the Kurds is not a pleasing prospect. Brig. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, who works with Iraqi security forces, said that "there appears to be some activity on the Turkish side, but it may just be brinksmanship."
"We can't have it to where we have friction with a NATO ally," Pittard said. The Kurdish regional government "must help out in muzzling the PKK or suffer the consequences."
Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.
