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2 Turks have might, but it will be a
fight By Richard M Bennett
The recent upsurge in attacks inside
Turkey by the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK) separatist movement has led to the first
cross-border response by the Turks following the
decision by Parliament to allow armed incursion
into northern Iraq.
Reports said that
Turkish aircraft on Wednesday attacked hideouts
thought to be used by the estimated 3,000 Kurdish
rebels as they travel between Iraq and Turkey. The
Turkish state-run Anatolian news agency reported
that operations were taking
place in four predominantly
Kurdish provinces of eastern Turkey and "in the
border area with Iraq".
Turkey has
maintained a small military presence in northern
Iraq and a number of important intelligence
listening posts since the mid-1990s, reportedly
initially with Israeli assistance. These bases
have monitored Kurdish activity in a number of
forward base camps scattered along the difficult
mountain terrain that borders Turkey.
The
PKK political leadership is based in a complex of
camps in the Qandil mountains near the Iraq-Iran
border; here also is the main military training
and support base infrastructure.
However,
the Kurdish insurgents have learnt the lessons of
Afghanistan and Lebanon well and have reportedly
spread their arms dumps, intelligence,
communications and main fighting units in dozens
of well-hidden sites across the whole northern
Iraq border zone.
The PKK leadership is
fully aware that the Qandil complex is likely to
be on the receiving end of a sustained aerial
attack by Turkish F16 and F4 fighters and quite
probably an Israeli-style special forces
helicopter assault by Turkish commando units.
That the Turkish military is capable of
such an attack is undoubted; only the will of the
government in Ankara has to be proved and assuming
Parliament means what it says, then the final part
is in place for a serious military attempt to
destroy or seriously disrupt the Kurdish
insurgents in northern Iraq, at a time of Turkey's
choosing.
Turkish armed forces
overview The army. Turkey has
had an important role to play in the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization since 1952. Its
forces fulfilled the vital mission of anchoring
the alliance's southern flank against the military
power of the communist bloc. Turkey was also
responsible for defending both the Bosphorus and
Dardanelles against any attempt by the Soviet
Union's Black Sea fleet to enter the Mediterranean
in time of war.
Following the end of the
Cold War in the early 1990s, the Turkish armed
forces underwent a significant reorganization
which saw a reduction of strength from some
525,000 in 1991 to about 400,000 in 2006. To
improve tactical flexibility, the large, unwieldy
divisional structure was replaced by smaller and
more mobile brigades.
Greatly increased
numbers of armored infantry carriers and
troop-carrying helicopters further improved the
Turkish army's ability to respond rapidly to what
was soon to be widely perceived as the nation's
greatest threat - Kurdish separatist insurgency.
Indeed, by 2007 the general staff felt
able to claim that at short notice, the army could
deploy a corps of about 40,000 troops to a combat
zone and that a rapid reaction force of some six
battalions could be deployed in land operations
anywhere in Turkey.
Counter-insurgency operations.
The conflict became far more serious
during 1992 and some 4,000 died on both sides,
including many civilians. The PKK is the most
violent and extremist of the Kurdish groups
operated from camps in Iraq, Iran and Syria close
to the Turkish border. By 1995, about 200,000
Turkish troops and police were deployed in the
Kurdish areas.
Saturation by such a large
security force and draconian counter-insurgency
tactics that resulted in the widescale evacuation
and destruction of Kurdish villages temporarily
undermined the insurgency, but only at the cost of
alienating large numbers of Kurds not directly
involved in the separatist movement.
However, by 1995 the army was forced to
respond more directly against an increasingly
effective Kurdish insurgency. Operation Steel saw
more than 35,000 Turkish troops operating in the
north of Iraq between March 20 and May 4 against
the PKK. This resulted in the deaths of 64 Turkish
soldiers, the capture of 13 insurgents, and the
deaths of another 555.
In 1997, Turkish
forces twice moved into northern Iraq. The first
was Operation Hammeris, with 114 Turkish soldiers
and a reported 2,730 Kurds being killed when over
40,000 troops penetrated some 200 kilometers into
Iraq. The second, Operation Dawn, resulted in the
loss of 31 Turkish lives and another 865 Kurdish
militants. [1]
Intelligence community
overview Deeply involved in countering the
Kurdish insurgency in southern Turkey and
monitoring the activities of Kurdish activists
abroad is the highly efficient and ruthless
National Intelligence Organization, or Milli
Istihbarat Teskilati.
Its directorate of
operations conducts covert operations while the
Directorate of Electronic and Technical
Intelligence is responsible for the interception
of email, radio and telephone communications.
Indeed, Turkey remains important to Washington as
highly secretive SIGINT (signals intelligence)
bases remain at Sinop, Adana and Diyarbakir.
Internal security remains the
responsibility of the special operations section
of the General Directorate of Security.
Kurdish insurgents The PKK was
founded along Maoist lines in 1974 by a group of
Turkish students of ethnic Kurdish descent led by
Abdullah Ocalan. It established a military wing,
the People's Liberation Army of Kurdistan
(Arteshen Rizgariya Gelli Kurdistan - ARGK) in
1985.
The PKK/ARGK continued with a
low-level insurgency throughout most of the 1980s
and 1990s, which still managed to claim the lives
of some 37,000, until in 1999 Ocalan was arrested
in Kenya and extradited to Turkey where he was
eventually convicted and sentenced to life
imprisonment. Undoubtedly, the arrest of Ocalan
seriously weakened the PKK.
Ocalan went on
to declare a unilateral ceasefire from his prison
cell and announced his desire to establish a
"peace initiative" with Turkey on Kurdish issues.
The PKK then publicly disavowed its terrorist
tactics.
In 2000, the ARGK wing was
renamed the People's Defense Force (HPG) and
supposedly only remained in existence for
defensive purposes. By 2002, the PKK had changed
its name to the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy
Congress (KADEK), also supposedly committing
itself to non-violent activities. However, in 2003
KADEK announced that it was dissolving itself and
creating a new pan-Kurdish organization called the
Kurdistan People's Conference (KHK) that would
seek to improve Kurdish rights through
negotiations with Turkey. These moves were
promptly dismissed by the Turkish authorities as
mere public relations tactics.
The recent
attacks on Turkish territory were either carried
out by a Kurdish terrorist group known as TAK or
by the Kurdistan Freedom Brigade (Hazen Rizgariya
Kurdistan, HRK). They suggest that the KHK/PKK
movement has finally decided that a renewed
violent insurgency is the only way to prevent the
movement losing all credibility amongst the
Kurdish peoples and being left to simply wither
away, deprived of sufficient volunteers, money and
support.
Threatened with massive Turkish
military reprisals, a still unrepentant Murat
Karajan, the KHK/PKK military wing leader, said
that "an eventual attack in Iraq from the Turkish
army would end in defeat, because all Kurds in
Iraq and Turkey would close ranks against the
threat". Despite this he still offered an
olive
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