Turkey's "Red Lines," U.S. Raid in Northern Iraq Cause Further Strain in Relations

By Jon Gorvett

It was described as "the biggest crisis of trust between Turkish and U.S. forces" by no less a person than the chief of the Turkish General Staff himself. It had most of Turkey's mainstream press baying for revenge against a "major stain on the nation's honor" and, for some 60 hours, it led to an unprecedented blockade of one NATO country's facilities by another.

The detention and interrogation of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. troops in the northern Iraqi city of Suleymaniye July 4 revealed in stark relief the major gulf in perspective that exists between Washington and Ankara over the future of the region. It may also have inadvertantly raised serious questions about U.S. and Turkish policy in Iraq in general, and who, exactly, is running the show there.

On the afternoon of July 4, some 150 U.S. troops with armored vehicles from the 173rd Airborne Brigade surrounded the four-building compound of the Iraqi Turkomen Front (ITF) in the center of the city.

Accounts differ as to what exactly happened next. The official U.S. position is that a raid was then conducted, suspects were detained and the premises searched. The Turkish press, however, has widely reported that a group of U.S. soldiers was first invited in, but then—after having been welcomed and given tea—pulled weapons on their Turkish and Turkomen hosts. The Turks also insist that the U.S. troops stole secret Turkish military codebooks and documents during their search, compromising Turkey's entire regional intelligence operation.

Whatever the case, three Turkish officers and eight non-commissioned officers were then handcuffed and led away. They were accompanied by 13 civilians, mostly ITF members, but also including Turkish businessman Turgay Tahran. He later told the Turkish papers that "we were subjected to inconceivable maltreatment" by the U.S. troops, who had taken the entire party to Baghdad for interrorgation. Some 60 hours later, all the detainees were released.

In the meantime, an outraged Turkish government had ordered its troops to block the Harbur border gate between Turkey and Iraq, which is used to convey supplies to the U.S. forces there, while Incirlik airbase, also used by the U.S., also was banned to American air traffic.

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher later claimed that the officers and civilians had been arrested because the U.S. forces had "reports of disturbing activities that they might have been involved in."

What those activities might have been was not firmly outlined, but the Turkish private TV station NTV claimed July 9 that these included allegedly training Turkomen forces in the use of explosives and weapons. Other Turkish and U.S. newspapers claimed that the Turkish troops had been suspected of plotting to assassinate the Kurdish governor of the city. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul denied such assertions July 9, describing them as "ridiculous claims."

However, the ITF compound in Suleymaniye had long been the recognized center for Turkish Special Forces operating in the city. These troops—never more than a few dozen—had been stationed there since the end of the Iraq war, when Kurdish forces from the region's two main groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), had taken over the whole of northern Iraq in cooperation with U.S. forces. Long before the war began, however, Suleymaniye had been the PUK's urban stronghold, making the Turkish presence perhaps all the more irritating to the PUK leaders.

When the Iraq invasion began, the fear had been that an expansion of Kurdish control to the whole of northern Iraq might have dire repercussions in terms of Turkish opposition. Turkey had long expressed the view that complete Kurdish control of northern Iraq was a "red line" which could not be crossed without triggering Turkish military intervention. Ankara feared that such control would lead to the creation of a Kurdish state in the region, which would in turn have a destabilizing effect on Turkey's southeast, the area bordering northern Iraq—also largely inhabited by ethnic Kurds, and the arena for a protracted armed conflict between Kurdish separatist guerrillas of the PKK—now renamed KADEK—and the Turkish army.

Turkey also has another "red line" in northern Iraq—namely the Turkomen population. The ITF has long enjoyed official recognition in Ankara as the voice of the Turkomen minority there—though others, such as the KDP and PUK, would dispute how representative they really are. Nonetheless, the ITF had consistently supported Turkish intervention in the region and had warned in increasingly lurid terms both before and during the Iraq war of bloodbaths and massacres of Turkomens across northern Iraq if the Kurds were ever allowed to gain control. Whatever the reality of these claims—and no bloodbath has so far occurred—they have been grist to the mill for Ankara's interventionist lobby.

Yet, it seems, few of these Turkish perspectives are shared by Washington. At the end of the war, however, the U.S. did try to address some of these concerns by allowing Turkish military observers into northern Iraq's cities. They also have continued to tolerate the presence in the mountains of northern Iraq of some 4,000 to 5,000 Turkish troops, who are supposedly engaged in anti-terrorist operations against the PKK/KADEK.

With regular shootings and bombings, and the failure to provide a political leadership—or even a workable political plan—in the rest of Iraq, the U.S. has had a much easier ride in the north. There, a functioning and reasonably sound unofficial state, separate and opposed to Baghdad, had been in existence since the 1991 Gulf war. The Kurds by and large have welcomed the U.S., and proved much more loyal allies to the cause of Iraqi invasion than the neighboring Turks.

This conflict of interest was widely recognized before, during and after the Iraq war broke out. It also appears to be what lay behind the July 4 raid.

"The U.S. has won the war but lost the peace," wrote columnist Erdal Safak in the leading daily Sabah July 6. "In such a hostile environment, the Kurds are the only group the U.S. trusts." In Ankara, the raid has been widely perceived as a warning shot to Turkey that the future of northern Iraq will be settled by an alliance between Washington and the KDP/PUK, and that Ankara no longer has any role to play there. This message was then underscored by the exclusion of the ITF from Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council. Of the council's 25 members, only one is Turkomen—despite Turkish and ITF claims that the Turkomen community in Iraq is of comparable size to the Kurdish—and she is a representative of an NGO, the Iraqi Turkomen Women's Council. A statement from the ITF issued in Ankara July 16 said that the structure of the council was thus "unacceptable."

Meanwhile, recent U.S. support for legislation in Turkey to provide a partial amnesty for the 4,000 to 5,000 PKK/KADEK guerrillas still based in northern Iraq also has strengthened the view that Washington wants Turkey out of northern Iraq. The U.S. has been pushing this hard in order to entice these fighters to return to Turkey, removing another reason for Ankara to station its troops across the border. The conflict between KADEK and the Turkish army—which has been largely one-sided since KADEK's predecessor, the PKK, declared a cease-fire in 1999—is mostly over in a military sense, with Washington seeing an amnesty as tying up the final loose ends.

Yet the crisis also has raised a lot of unanswered questions. On the Turkish side, if U.S. claims about the soldiers organizing the Turkomens for military operations are true, then this begs the question of whose orders they might be following. It seems highly unlikely the Turkish government would support such a move, desperate as it currently is to restore good relations with the U.S. These were badly damaged by the parliament's pre-Iraq war refusal to allow U.S. troops entrance into northern Iraq through Turkey, and may be battered still further by the current U.S. congressional debate on whether or not to recognize the Armenian genocide.

The answer may lie, as it often seems to, in the old Turkish expression, "Askeri bak"—"look for the soldier"—which is also where the Turkish press largely first sought U.S. explanations for the raid. Initially, the assumption in Ankara had been that it was an unauthorized operation by Col. Bill Mayville, the local U.S. commander. As time passed without official U.S. comment or the release of the soldiers from Baghdad, however, the raid began to look very deliberate, and ordered at the highest level. The U.S. must have known the Turkish troops were inside the building, and, clearly, 150 soldiers with armored vehicles do not randomly raid anywhere. Yet Turkish press reports also suggested that when Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erodgan had first phoned Vice President Dick Cheney for an explanation, the vice president claimed to have no idea what he was talking about.

The puzzle remains, then, as to what exactly the chains of command really are in northern Iraq right now—and not only in the concrete bunkers of the ITF headquarters in Suleymaniye. dug rifle butts into his neck and back and that the first night he was handcuffed and left alone in a tiny room open to the sky.

The following day he was moved to the airport, where he said for eight days he shared a tent with 22 adults, sleeping on the dirt, with no water to wash or change his clothes.

Sufiyan said that he was pulled from the tent one morning, hooded and manacled again, and driven to Sarhiyeh prison, to be kept in a room with 20 other youths aged 15 or 16—regarded as minors by the Geneva Convention.

A woman inmate took his name and details, and when she was released she alerted Sufiyan's family. On June 21, the family obtained an injunction from a judge ordering the boy's release, but they were told at the prison that the signature of an Iraqi judge no longer had legal authority. Even when an American military lawyer demanded his freedom, U.S. troops refused to release him until the lawyer appeared at the prison. Privately, U.S. military lawyers say that they are appalled at how some of the arrests are being carried out.

At the gates of Abu Ghraib, frustration and anger force men such as Adnan Akhjan, 38, a former civil servant, to shout abuse at the U.S. guards.

Mr. Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: "People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?"

U.S. officials say that they are struggling to cope with the continuing looting, as well as attacks on troops. They say that until the fledgling Iraqi police force is fully operational and jails are repaired, they represent the only law and order.

Each morning at the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad there is a silent line of Iraqis queueing to find out where a relative might be. The American authorities have said that they will not inform the Red Cross about detainees until 21 days after they have been arrested. The International Committe of the Red Cross has been allowed to see some of the prisoners, but says that it cannot even begin to guess at the numbers detained.

An Iraqi exile who had been in Baghdad for only three days after living in Denmark for the past 27 years found himself caught up in an American swoop after a shooting in a street market. Not realizing that the man could read English, his interrogator made no attempt to cover up his case file, which described him as "suspected assassin."

The man, who was held for more than 30 days, is afraid to give his name and says that he is now considering leaving Baghdad for good.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.