Tag Archives: Kurds

Iraq requests U.N. emergency meeting on Turkish troops in north

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan makes a speech during a meeting at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, August 24, 2016.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq has requested an emergency meeting of the United Nations  Security Council to discuss the presence of Turkish troops on its territory as a dispute with Ankara escalates.

Turkey’s parliament voted last week to extend the deployment of an estimated 2,000 troops across northern Iraq by a year to combat “terrorist organizations” – a likely reference to Kurdish rebels as well as Islamic State.

Iraq condemned the vote, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi warned Turkey risked triggering a regional war. On Wednesday, Ankara and Baghdad each summoned the other’s ambassador in protest at remarks from the other camp.

“The Iraqi foreign ministry has presented a request for an emergency meeting of the Security Council to discuss the Turkish violation of Iraq’s territory and interference in its internal affairs,” said a statement on the ministry’s website.

Turkey says its military is in Iraq at the invitation of Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government, with which Ankara maintains solid ties. Baghdad says no such invitation was ever issued.

Most of the Turkish troops are at a base in Bashiqa, north of Mosul and close to Turkey’s border, where they are helping to train Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga and Sunni fighters.

Tensions between Baghdad and Ankara have risen with expectations of an offensive by U.S.-backed Iraqi forces to retake Mosul, the last major Iraqi city under Islamic State control, captured by the militants two years ago.

Turkey has said the campaign will send a wave of refugees over its border, and potentially on to Europe.

Ankara also worries that Baghdad’s Shi’ite Muslim-led forces will destabilize Mosul’s largely Sunni population and worsen ethnic strife across the region, where there are also populations of Turkmens, ethnic kin of the Turks.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim echoed this worry again on Thursday, saying the presence of Ankara’s troops in Bashiqa will continue to ensure that the demographics of the region will not change. Iraq’s hostile reaction is  “incomprehensible”, he added.

However, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu sought to play down the spat over Bashiqa in comments later on Thursday.

“We do not see a serious problem there and we think this  problem will be overcome,” he told a news conference with his Italian counterpart in Ankara. “Iraq must leave the rhetoric aside so we can assess how to resolve this subject.”

He said around 3,000 local fighters, Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen, were being trained against Islamic State at the camp and they had so far “neutralized” around 750 of the group’s militants in the area.

(Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli in Baghdad, Ece Toksabay in Ankara, Daren Butler in Istanbul; Editing by Ralph Boulton)

Turkey signals no let up in Syria campaign despite concerns

Turkish army tanks make their way towards the Syrian border town of Jarablus

By Edmund Blair and Asli Kandemir

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey’s army chief signaled no let up in a Syria offensive Washington has criticized for targeting U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters as well as jihadists, and said its successes showed last month’s failed coup had not dented the military’s power.

Turkish-backed forces began the offensive last week by capturing the Syrian frontier town of Jarablus from Islamic State; they then advanced on areas controlled by Kurdish-aligned militias which have U.S. support in battling jihadists.

Turkey, which is fighting a Kurdish insurgency at home, has openly said the operation dubbed “Euphrates Shield” has a dual goal of driving away Islamic State and preventing Kurdish forces extending their areas of control along the Turkish border.

Washington said the offensive by its NATO ally risked undermining the fight against Islamic State because it was focusing on Kurdish-aligned militias. Ankara says it will not take orders from anyone on how to protect the nation.

“By pursuing the Euphrates Shield operation, which is crucial for our national security and for our neighbors’ security, the Turkish Armed Forces are showing they have lost none of their strength,” Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar said in a statement on Tuesday to mark a national holiday.

On the eve of the Victory Day holiday, President Tayyip Erdogan said the operation would continue until all threats, including that of Kurdish militia fighters, were removed from the border area.

Turkey is still reeling from an attempted coup in July in which rogue military commanders used warplanes and tanks to try to oust Erdogan and the government, exposing splits in the ranks of NATO’s second biggest military.

In a subsequent purge of suspected coup sympathizers, 80,000 people have been removed from both civilian and military duties, including many generals, officers and rank-and-file soldiers.

FLARE-UP

Echoing U.S. concerns about the Turkish offensive in Syria, French President Francois Hollande said he understood Turkey’s need to defend itself from Islamic State but that targeting Kurdish forces which were battling jihadists could further inflame the five-year-old Syrian conflict.

“Those multiple, contradictory interventions carry risks of a general flare-up,” he told a meeting of French ambassadors.

Criticism by any Western powers will add to tensions with Ankara, which has accused the United States and Europe of proving poor allies by calling for restraint as the government rounded up coup sympathizers, and failing to appreciate the depth of the threat the coup presented to Turkey’s democracy.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Ankara last week to try to patch up ties and voice support for the government. But this week, U.S. officials described the current direction of the offensive as “unacceptable”.

In its northern Syria offensive, Turkish forces and their rebel allies have taken a string of villages in areas controlled by the Kurdish-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and advanced toward Manbij, a city the SDF seized from Islamic State this month in a U.S.-backed campaign.

Turkey says its forces have struck multiple positions held by the Kurdish YPG militia, part of the SDF coalition.

The YPG says its forces withdrew from the region before the Turkish assault and have already crossed the Euphrates, in line with a demand from the United States to withdraw to the eastern side of the river that flows through Syria or lose U.S. support.

Turkey wants to stop Kurdish forces taking control of territory that lies between cantons to the east and west that they already hold, and so creating an unbroken Kurdish- controlled corridor on Turkey’s southern border.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Callus and John Irish in Paris, David Dolan and Nick Tattersall in Istanbul; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Ralph Boulton)

Syria’s Kurds rebuked for seeking autonomous region

RMEILAN, Syria (Reuters) – Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northern regions voted to seek autonomy on Thursday, drawing rebukes from the Damascus government, neighboring power Turkey and Washington over a move that could complicate U.N.-backed peace talks.

The vote to unite three Kurdish-controlled provinces in a federal system appears aimed at creating a self-run entity within Syria, a status that Kurds have enjoyed in neighboring Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The proclamation is an open challenge to many of the sides in Syria’s five-year-old civil war, as well as their international sponsors, who have mainly been battling for control of what they say must remain a unified state.

The Kurds, who enjoy U.S. military support, have beaten back Islamic State fighters to control swathes of northern Syria, but the main Syrian Kurdish party, the PYD, has so far been excluded from peace talks that began this week in Geneva.

The three Kurdish-controlled regions agreed at a conference in Rmeilan in northeast Syria to establish the self-administered “federal democratic system of Rojava – Northern Syria”, officials announced. Rojava is the Kurdish name for north Syria.

Officials said at a news conference they intended to begin preparations for a federal system, including electing a joint leadership and a 31-member organizing committee which would prepare a “legal and political vision” for the system within six months.

A document seen by Reuters, issued at the meeting, said the aim was to “establish democratic self-administered regions which run and organize themselves … in the fields of economy, society, security, healthcare, education, defense and culture.”

SWIFT TO DENOUNCE

Both the government of President Bashar al-Assad and Turkey, a regional heavyweight that is one of Assad’s strongest enemies, were swift to denounce the declaration.

“Any such announcement has no legal value and will not have any legal, political, social or economic impact as long as it does not reflect the will of the entire Syrian people,” state news agency SANA cited a foreign ministry source as saying.

An official in Turkey said: “Syria must remain as one without being weakened and the Syrian people must decide on its future in agreement and with a constitution. Every unilateral initiative will harm Syria’s unity.”

Even Washington, which has backed Kurdish fighters with air strikes on Islamic State targets, was displeased.

“We don’t support self-ruled, semi-autonomous zones inside Syria. We just don’t,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby.

“What we want to see is a unified, whole Syria that has in place a government that is not led by Bashar al-Assad, that is responsive to the Syrian people. Whole, unified, nonsectarian Syria, that’s the goal.”

Turkey fears growing Kurdish sway in Syria is fuelling separatism among its own minority Kurds, and considers the main Syrian Kurdish militia to be an ally of the PKK, which has fought an insurgency for Kurdish autonomy in southeast Turkey.

The PYD has consistently said it wants a model of decentralized government for Syria, not partition. The document agreed on Thursday stressed that the federal system would “guarantee the unity of Syrian territory”.

Nawaf Khalil, a former PYD official, played down parallels between Kurdish aspirations in Syria and Iraq, saying Thursday’s announcement was a joint move taken together with the region’s other ethnic communities.

“The experience resulted from discussions with Arabs and Assyrians, Chechens, Armenians, Turkmen. There is a special case in Rojava, it is not like the path taken in Iraq,” he said.

KURDISH CONTROL

Syrian Kurds effectively control an uninterrupted stretch of 250 miles along the Syrian-Turkish border from the Euphrates river to the frontier with Iraq. They also hold a separate section of the northwestern border in the Afrin area.

The areas are separated by roughly 60 miles of territory, much of it still held by Islamic State.

A U.S.-backed force which includes Kurdish YPG fighters has been battling Islamic State and other militants, making some gains in Raqqa, Hasaka and Aleppo provinces. Kurdish official Idris Nassan said those “liberated” areas were included in Thursday’s agreement.

On Saturday, Syria’s government in Damascus ruled out the idea of a federal system for the country, just days after a Russian official said that could be a possible model. Russia’s five-month military intervention in Syria helped turn the tide of Syria’s war back in Assad’s favor.

President Vladimir Putin, who has announced the withdrawal of most Russian forces, said on Thursday Moscow’s intervention had created the conditions for Syria’s peace process.

The United Nations Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, who is convening the peace talks in Geneva, suggested last week that a federal model for Syria could be discussed during negotiations.

“All Syrians have rejected division (of Syria) and federalism can be discussed at the negotiations,” he told Al Jazeera television.

(Additional reporting by Lisa Barrington and John Davison in Beirut, Orhan Coskun in Ankara and David Alexander in Washington; Writing by Dominic Evans and Peter Graff; Editing by Andrew Roche)