Turkey Skeptical of Iraqi Vows to Stop Kurdish Raids

November 4, 2007 - NYT

Turkey Skeptical of Iraqi Vows to Stop Kurdish Raids

By HELENE COOPER and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

ISTANBUL, Nov. 3 — Turkey said on Saturday that two days of meetings with officials from Iraq and the United States on how to stop Kurdish militants who attack Turkey from northern Iraq had produced no new proposals.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with the prime minister of Iraq, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and the premier of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at a conference here, in a bid to ease tensions between Iraq and Turkey over the rebels, known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.

Iraq pledged it would enact measures to stop the guerrillas. On Saturday afternoon, offices of a political party affiliated with the P.K.K. were shut in at least two northern Iraqi cities. But Turkish officials said the measures had been offered before.

“It has been a meeting with no resolution,” a Foreign Ministry official said after the conference. “There have been no tangible steps offered to us.”

Iraqi officials said that they were setting up checkpoints in northern Iraq and that Kurdish guerrillas would be arrested if stopped. Kurdish security forces also shut down the offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, which has links to the P.K.K., in Sulaimaniya and Erbil. The measures were meant to try to forestall a threatened Turkish retaliatory strike, which Iraqi and American diplomats fear would further inflame Iraq.

“The Iraqi government will actively help Turkey to overcome the P.K.K.,” Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, told reporters after his meeting here with Ms. Rice and Turkey’s foreign minister, Ali Babacan. “We are committed to undertaking a number of demonstrable and visible initiatives to disrupt, pacify and to isolate the P.K.K.”

In Sulaimaniya, 40 gun-toting members of local security forces surrounded and raided the party’s office. One security force commander said that party members were not from the city and were being ordered to leave.

But a senior party official, Dr. Abu Bakr Majid, said later that party members had been told to go home but had not been ordered out of the city, and that officers told them their computers and other equipment would not be removed.

He disputed that party members were not from the city, and said there were no arrests on Saturday in Erbil or Sulaimaniya, though he said a party leader was detained in Dohuk. Party offices in Kirkuk and Mosul were not raided, he said.

The forces in the raid seemed to be on edge, briefly detaining a reporter and photographer from The New York Times and ordering them onto the back of a truck loaded with armed men.

“We’re doing this because we’re getting pressure from Turkey,” said one of the officers, who declined to give his name.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry official, who declined to be identified according to diplomatic protocol, dismissed the raids as theater. “We consider these as secondary steps, nothing sufficient enough to actually resolve the conflict,” he said.

He said the Iraqi delegation “tried to create an air of new measures, but behind closed doors, they could not offer us anything new.”

It was not clear how effective the Iraqi raids on the party offices would be in disrupting P.K.K. activities. The guerrillas have sympathizers within the Kurdish security forces and can move from their mountain bases to the cities by pretending to be unconnected to the P.K.K. They also have provisions stored in their hide-outs.

The party’s Erbil office was closed in 2006, only to be allowed to re-open two months later.

At the Istanbul conference, Mr. Maliki told officials from the United States, Europe and the Middle East that Iraq had overcome the threat of civil war.

“The civil war that Al Qaeda wanted to spread has been prevented,” he said. “Iraq has overcome the period of anger and is stronger and more experienced today.”

The rosy picture painted by Mr. Maliki was at odds with the frustration expressed by Turkey, the host of the conference. Turkish officials hinted strongly that if Iraq and the United States did not act swiftly to rein in the guerrillas, Mr. Erdogan would decide he had no choice but to strike across the border, Arab and American diplomats said.

Mr. Erdogan has set Monday, when he is scheduled to meet with President Bush at the White House, as a de facto deadline for American and Iraqi action. The Turkish military has indicated that it is willing to wait for Mr. Erdogan’s return before launching any operation into Iraq.

“Important and immediate measures are as necessary against the terror groups in certain parts of Iraq that hurt neighboring countries as they are against the terror groups inside Iraq that cause trouble for the Iraqi administration,” Mr. Erdogan said in his opening statement. “A tiny flame can become a wildfire.”

The Kurdish issue dominated Saturday’s meeting, held at the ornate Ciragan Palace on the banks of the Bosporus. Indeed, Iraqi officials complained that the focus of the meeting, which they had hoped would be on ways the participants could help prop up the Iraqi government, had shifted to talk among Middle Eastern powers about fears that the violence in Iraq threatened to engulf the region.

Helene Cooper reported from Istanbul, and Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Sulaimaniya, Iraq. Sabrina Tavernise and Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Michael Kamber from Sulaimaniya.