Ankara, July 28: Iraq must do more to stop Kurdish rebels using hideouts in its territory to launch deadly attacks in Turkey, a Turkish minister said Monday after meeting with Iraqi and U.S. officials to discuss the issue.
“We always have greater expectations. We are after more solid results,” Interior Minister Besir Atalay said, regarding the attacks by rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party, which the U.S. and European Union consider a terrorist organization.
Turkish warplanes often attack rebel hideouts in northern Iraq from where the guerrillas have staged hit-and-run attacks on Turkish targets for decades. The last air strike occurred a month ago after a land mine blast on the Turkish side of the border killed six soldiers. As usual, there was no information on any casualties among the rebels, who are fighting for autonomy in Turkey’s southeast.
After Tuesday’s talks in Ankara, Interior Minister Besir Atalay told reporters that Turkey wants to see concrete action by Iraq to stop the Kurdish rebel attacks. Turkey has long been urging Iraq to choke off supplies to the group’s bases and arrest its leaders, but Iraq’s central government, and the Iraqi Kurd administration in the north, have not done that.
Turkey also has urged Iraq to shut down the Makhmur refugee camp in Iraq. The camp houses an estimated 9,000 Turkish Kurds who fled to Iraq in the early 1990s during fighting between Turkish troops and Kurdish rebels. Turkish authorities accuse Kurdish guerrillas of indoctrinating children in the camp to become rebels.
“Makhmur camp is on our agenda. There is need for further analysis, exchange of information on this issue,” Atalay said.
Iraq’s Minister of State for National Security Shirwan al-Waili reiterated Baghdad’s commitment to fight the Kurdistan Workers Party rebels. “Our aim is to kick the terrorist organization from the Iraqi soil, border areas,” he said.
U.S. Maj. Gen. Steven A. Hummer, the deputy chief of staff for operations in Iraq’s multinational force, also attended the security meeting, which came ahead of the 25th anniversary of the start of the conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people.
The Kurdistan Workers Party started as a Marxist-Leninist group demanding an independent homeland, but it now says it seeks some degree of self rule, similar to that of Spain’s semiautonomous Catalonia region.
Abdullah Ocalan — the rebel group’s leader, who was arrested in 1999_ still enjoys a personality cult among sympathizers and is believed to send directives through lawyers from prison. Ocalan is widely expected to communicate somehow with his rebels and Turkey ahead of Aug. 15, the day when the guerrillas first took up arms in 1984 to try to end the bitter war.
Turkey rules out dialogue with the rebels, whom it also considers as terrorists.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week said Turkey has been working on a new “opening” in the Kurdish question but that his government would never accept guidelines from any other side.
Atalay said he would inform the media about the Turkish plans in the coming days.
Under pressure from the EU, Turkey has granted greater cultural rights to Kurds, including the launch of a 24-hour television channel broadcasting in the once-banned Kurdish language earlier this year.
—-Agencies