This morning’s stories of Turkey and Iraq propose a theme, and I’m afraid that theme is disaster. From north of Kurdistan right down to Basra, you don’t have to be Iraqi to hate what’s happening there, or to own — stars on your epaulets or otherwise — that you want out.
The Times of London’s lede story starts it right off with Iraqi Kurdistan’s regional president Massoud Barzani warning Turkey that any move across the border starts a war:
“If they invade or if there is any incursion, it means war,” Mr Barzani said at his offices on the outskirts of Arbil. “If they attack our people, our interests, our territories then there will be no limit because everything is subject to that incursion.” …
He also hinted that Turkey had another reason for its tough stance on the PKK, which is not a new problem. “I am about to be convinced that the PKK is only an excuse,” he said. “The continuous, direct threats of Turkey against the Kurdistan region and its behaviour has created a doubt, leading us close to the conviction that exactly this is the aim. The Kurdistan region is the target, otherwise why should we be involved in the fight between Turkey and the PKK?”
By the way, what ToL calls Barzani’s “offices,” The Independent refers to (in a nice touch) as his “mountain fortress” ten miles north of Irbil.
Meanwhile, the Turkish army tells ToL that it killed 20 Kurdish guerrillas (the New York Times says 15) yesterday in an 8,000-troop ground and air assault in Tunceli, an eastern province of Turkey 370 miles from the Iraqi border. In other words, Turkey is now mowing down its own citizens.
For a sense of what local effects this will have, read Yigal Schleifer’s Christian Science Monitor report from where not many Westerners go — the Kurdish towns of southeastern Turkey. Their residents, sympathetic to the PKK’s aims but tired of the fighting, were just beginning to feel a bit more civic comfort. This summer, for the first time, the majority of them voted for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party over Kurdish ones.
“I am 30 years old and this current government is the most democratic government that I have seen,” a local reporter tells CSM. “But,” he adds, “I don’t think the government can continue in its democratic ways in the current situation.” A mayor whose two sons were killed fighting for the PKK speaks for Turkish Kurds alienated by anti-PKK rhetoric and protests across the country, but not yet to the point of fully supporting the rebels again:
“The pain is deep, but still there’s a hope for peace. If there is an incursion …our democratic rights will be lost. People are sick and tired of this conflict. They hate it.”
Alas, these civilians would not be comforted by the New York Times’s Sabrina Tavernise’s findings during a visit to the PKK near Raniya, in extreme northeast Iraq. “Our condition is good,” one fighter tells her, heavily sugaring his tea. “How about yours?” Indeed, casualness permeates this story: the fighter’s, the Kurdish regional government’s, all of Tavernise’s various interviewees’ — for what they deem a very good reason indeed, no one’s in a hurry at all to mess with the PKK:
Fayeq Mohamed Goppy, a leader in the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, an offshoot of the P.K.K. that still operates freely, argues that Iraqi Kurdish leaders are only paying lip service to wanting the P.K.K. to leave. In reality, the politicians want the separatists around as protection against Sunni Arab extremists, who most Iraqi Kurds believe will move in if the P.K.K. leaves the mountains. …
“They really don’t want P.K.K. to go,” he said in an interview in his home in Sulaimaniya. If the group is eliminated, the Iraqi Kurdish area “is a really small piece for eating, very easy to swallow.”
Mark Parris, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey now at the Brookings Institution, believes Massoud Barzani sees the PKK as a future bargaining chip with Turkey, one he won’t use until he absolutely has to: “The single most important piece of negotiating capital may very well be his ability to take care of the P.K.K.,” Parris tells Tavernise.
And time is on Barzani’s side: All the diplomatic visiting and conferencing already scheduled will eat up at least another week, by which time, the weather may take over. “Soon there will be snow,” Tavernise quotes Goran Kader, a Communist Party leader in Sulaimaniya. “The roads will be blocked. That will be that until next year.”
I can’t say how casual he sounded, but Gen. David Petraeus was certainly playing mysterious with NYT’s Alissa J. Rubin and James Glanz:
“I am not going to be saying anything about what we may be doing with our longtime NATO ally Turkey, although we clearly are doing things with them,” General Petraeus said. “Nor am I saying what we’re doing with our longtime Iraqi partners,” he added.
Our longtime Iraqi partners, Dave? Would that be the ones with longtime Iranian partners? Not sayin’, huh? (He’s also not sayin’ another word about whether Sultan Hashem, Saddam’s defense minister, should escape his death sentence, according to Rubin and Glanz.)
Well, it seems to be getting so that the less you say to or about anyone in Iraq, the safer. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the AP report the kidnapping of 11 anti-jihadist Sunni and Shiite sheikhs from Baqubah (by the Mahdi Army? by al-Qaeda in Iraq? theories vary), as they drove out of Baghdad after meeting with someone in the Green Zone.
Nor, apparently, did al-Qaeda in Iraq take well to be disparaged by the U.S. military: According to WaPo, “… in Diyala province, a grave containing 15 bodies, mainly of female students, was found in the al-Ehaimer area, northeast of Baqubah, which is under the control of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to local officials.” And the AP now reports from Baqubah that a bicycle-bomber blew himself up today among recruits outside a police camp, killing at least 27 and wounding 20. This attack too bore AQI hallmarks:
Mohammed al-Kirrawi, a doctor at the Baquba general hospital, said most victims were struck by iron balls packed with explosives to achieve maximum casualties. He said the hospital lacked the necessary equipment to save many of the wounded.
Bombings, murders, kidnappings — very strong messages indeed. But the one in today’s online Telegraph is also unmistakable: “We have got it wrong.”
It was as astonishing an admission as any that has emerged from the lips of a British officer in the four and a half years since the tanks rolled over the Iraqi border. The British Army, said the man sitting in a prefab hut in Britain’s last base in the country, were tired of fighting.
“We would go down there [Basra], dressed as Robocop, shooting at people if they shot at us, and innocent people were getting hurt,” he said. “We don’t speak Arabic to explain and our translators were too scared to work for us any more. What benefit were we bringing to these people?”
The officer — one of the most senior in Iraq — agreed to speak to The Sunday Telegraph only on the highly unusual condition of anonymity, but he made clear that what he said reflected a major change in British tactics. “We are tired of firing at people,” he said. “We would prefer to find a political accommodation.”
The headline is “Message from Basra: ‘get us out of here,’” and I suggest you read every word.
I can’t very well finish today’s papers’ discussion of the Iraqi clusterf*ck without bringing in past masters of the form Ahmad Chalabi and Ayad Allawi, now can I? Yep, both are riding high — and looking to ride higher — in Baghdad again.
McClatchy has Chalabi’s re-emergence as a “central figure in the latest U.S. strategy for Iraq.” This time he’s Petraeus’s new point-man in pressing the Maliki government to use “early security gains from the surge” to deliver better electricity, health, education, and security to Baghdad’s neighborhoods. (Just in case Maliki can do a better job than the U.S. military, various militias, insurgents, and sundry other U.S.-backed groups who’ve tried and failed before.)
Services or no, if Chalabi doesn’t beat him to it, Ayad Allawi would clearly cotton to trying to run Iraq again. Accordingly, NYT has a story on how Robert D. Blackwill, the guy who put him in the prime ministership last time for free, is working to do it again – this time, for a very fat fee.
Two things strike me here: (a) there’s just no end to this, and (b) Mr. Blackwill is unusually well named. Make it three things: (c) Get. us. out. of. there.
lotus
Tags: Ahmad Chalabi, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ayad Allawi, David Petraeus, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurds, Mahdi Army, Massoud Barzani, PKK, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Robert D. Blackwill, Turkey, U.K., U.S. military
