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Ah yes, here we go. Turkomen, that's the ethnic minority I was trying to think of:
Turkey, the U.S. and the Kurds in northern Iraq
John K. Cooley IHT
Complicated alliance
ATHENS Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials have plenty to discuss with Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul in Washington this week. The main subject - a U.S. request to Turkey to send at least 10,000 Turkish peacekeeping troops to Iraq - could crucially affect U.S. relations with its old ally.
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The United States and Britain sorely need an international peacekeeping force, with or without UN auspices, to stabilize Iraq. With the dispatch of a few hundred Poles and a token force offered by Spain, Italy and some eastern European states, and after refusals from France, Germany and India to send soldiers, the idea of Turkish participation has become more interesting.
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Foreign Minister Gul has indicated that Ankara would consider the idea, and Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, confirms it has been raised. But Turkey has its own agenda in Iraq, which may clash with America's Kurdish allies.
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Like Washington, Ankara wants to warm up U.S.-$ Turkish relations, which were strongly chilled last March. The extreme unpopularity of the brewing U.S.-led war in Iraq then led Turkey to reject U.S. requests to allow over 60,000 U.S. troops to use Turkey as a war base.
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Ankara and Washington would also like to put behind them at least two publicly-reported incidents since last March. Some Turkish Special Forces soldiers in Iraq's northern Kurdish region were detained and expelled by U.S. officers who suspected them of planning hostile acts against the Kurds.
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Turkish troops were originally deployed in Iraq's north to monitor a cease-fire between the two main Kurdish groups and to keep an eye on about 5,000 separatist Kurdish fighters of the outlawed Marxist Kurdistan Workers' Party, now called KADEK. These have consolidated and strengthened their old bases in northern Iraq as a result of the security provided by U.S. and British air power against Saddam Hussein's forces during the previous decade, and the relative stability and prosperity brought by the allied occupation since March.
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Rebel Kurdish attacks have recently recurred inside Turkey. This, and Turkey's disapproval of the Kurds' seizure of the oil-rich Kirkuk and Mosul regions - where the ethnic Turkish or Turcoman minority lives alongside Kurds and Arabs - have added to mutual distrust between Turkey and the United States. Turkey's government and its politically powerful armed forces have an almost paranoid fear that the 23 million or so ethnic Kurds in Turkey will be encouraged by the ascendancy of U.S.-protected Kurds in northern Iraq to join in creating the nucleus of an independent Kurdish state.
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Turkey's perennial Kurdish problem is a huge embarrassment at a time when Turkey is seeking entry into the European Union. Some steps have been taken in authorizing Kurdish language instruction and in other matters, but much remains to be done. These concerns were apparently discussed when General John Abizaid, the new American commander in Iraq, and other officials, met in Ankara July 17-19. Their meetings with senior Turkish military chiefs seem to have helped prepare for Gul's current talks in Washington. These talks should include discussion on how to overcome Kurdish opposition to the entry of any large Turkish contingent into Iraq.
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Both the U.S. Ambassador in Ankara, Robert Pearson, and U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the strongest believers in a U.S.-$ Turkish partnership in the administration, have repeatedly said that Washington supports Ankara's wish to rid northern Iraq of rebel Kurds. KADEK is listed in both capitals as a terrorist organization.
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The Turkish and Kurdish factors are further complicating the already complex and burdensome tasks the Bush administration has taken on in Iraq. Tough, forward-looking and imaginative diplomacy is urgently needed to deal with them now, before they erupt into more violence, or split the United States further apart from Turkey, its ally of the cold war years. The writer is an author and former foreign correspondent who has covered North Africa, the Middle East, Greece and Turkey since the 1950s.
http://www.iht.com/articles/103889.html
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