BY ALI BAYRAMOGLU (YENI SAFAK)
Columnist Ali Bayramoglu comments on the detention of Turkish special forces officers by US troops over the weekend in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah. A summary of his column is as follows:
Let’s realize this first: US arrests of 11 Turkish officers during a weekend raid in Sulaimaniya can in no way be explained in reference to Parliament’s refusal last March to allow the US to use Turkish soil as a springboard for a northern front against Iraq. In other words, short-minded scribbling like, ‘Turkey would be in a different position in the face of the US today should it meet Washington’s requests during the Iraq war,’ is completely false. If this were true, then we would have to accept that Turkey were nothing but the 51st state of the US, a puppet state which unconditionally moved in lockstep with every US demand. The main reason for the recent standoff between Ankara and Washington is in fact related to the Kurdish issue in northern Iraq. Both Turkey and the US’ policies on the issue have remained the same over the years until the fall of the Saddam regime. The US military presence in Iraq would sooner or later have an inescapable impact on Turkish-US relations. And now we are effectively facing that impact. For the Bush administration, Kurds and the northern Iraq are now more important than ever, as they are crucial to the new US-established order in Iraq and Washington’s quest for a forced ‘Pax-Americana.’ Obviously, US ambitions in Iraq could not get along with Turkey’s official view on the issue, and apparently, there is now a clash between Ankara’s interests and those of Washington. This situation wouldn’t be different if Turkey ‘fully’ cooperated with the US during the war.
Yesterday’s Vatan newspaper wrote: ‘The Sulaimaniya raid was planned in Washington and constituted a message to Turkey that it is not wanted in northern Iraq… In fact it was the very first attempt to oust the Turkish forces in the region.’
Why did the US raid in Sulaymaniyah come on the 4th of July? Was it related to the assassination attempt to Cemil Bayik, one of the terrorist group PKK/KADEK’s top figures? Who is it behind this assassination attempt? Murat Yetkin from daily Radical asked in his column yesterday: ‘Is it possible that Turkish special forces could engage in such activities in northern Iraq without Ankara’s consent?
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION