U.S. wants to deal "aggressively" with Kurdish PKK http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-07-25T215503Z_01_N25231509_RTRUKOC_0_US-TURKEY-USA.xml&archived=False
Tue Jul 25, 2006
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush told Turkish Prime Minster Tayyip Erdogan that the United States wants to deal more aggressively with cross-border attacks by Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq, the White House said on Tuesday.
"We have talked about establishing a trilateral framework between the United States, Iraq and Turkey to address this issue," national security adviser Stephen Hadley said after Bush met Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "We have already identified some steps that can be taken and that the Iraqis are going to take," he told reporters.
Several thousand members of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, are believed to be hiding in the mountains of mainly Kurdish northern Iraq, from where they slip across the border to attack Turkish police, troops and other targets.
Turkey blames the PKK for more than 30,000 deaths since the start of its campaign for a Kurdish homeland in 1984.
"There have to be concrete steps we can take to show both Iraqis and Turks that there is a plan to deal with that problem and that it is something we have to address more aggressively," Hadley said.
"The president has made that assurance to Prime Minister Erdogan ... Now we've got to deliver on it."
Diplomats say Turkey is frustrated that the United States accepts Israel's right to launch attacks against its enemies over the border in Lebanon while remaining opposed to Ankara taking unilateral action against the PKK in Iraq.
The United States, like Turkey and the European Union, views the PKK as a terrorist organization but says broader security problems in Iraq prevent the kind of full-scale military crackdown on the group that Ankara demands. Armed clashes have intensified since April, when the Turkish military -- the second biggest in NATO after that of the United States -- sent an extra 40,000 troops to the southeast to reinforce some 220,000 soldiers already stationed there.
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