Turkey hits Kurdish targets in Iraq
The raid followed an attack earlier Wednesday by the rebels of the PKK, or Kurdish Workers’ Party, that killed eight soldiers and one village militia member. About 40 Turkish security personnel have been killed in the country’s largely Kurdish southeast since the beginning of July. The bloodshed comes at a critical time, just as the country’s politicians are preparing to rewrite the Turkish constitution — a move some commentators had hoped would help resolve the simmering conflict with the Kurds by establishing a more liberal <a href="http://www.trading666.com/brand-bags-t1-8.html"><strong>wholesale juicy handbags online</strong></a> and consensual order. But the recent events — and a political impasse between Turkey’s ruling AK party and the main Kurdish group in parliament — have instead raised fears of more tensions ahead in a conflict that since the 1980s has killed more than 40,000 people. After the latest PKK attack, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that he and his government were “at the end of our patience” and jettisoned an earlier promise not to respond until the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. In an implicit warning to Turkey’s main Kurdish party, which garnered 3 million votes in June’s general election but is currently boycotting parliament, he added, “People who don’t put a distance between themselves and terrorism will pay the price.” Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, said that the PKK is <a href="http://www.trading666.com/others-t1-29.html"><strong>cheap marlboro red cigarettes online </strong></a> a shadow of the force it was in the 1990s, when the conflict was at its height and the group had safety in Syria. But he added that the more important issue is the increased tension between the majority Turks and the Kurds, who account for 15 to 20 percent of the country’s population. “The violence strengthens those in Turkey who would likely continue with hard-line policies,” he said. “The prime minister has already moved in that direction.” A 2009 attempt by Erdogan to reach a negotiated <a href="http://www.trading666.com/T-shirt-polo-men-t-shirt-f2-61-c3-89.html"><strong>buy cheap polo t-shirt online </strong></a> settlement ended with a public relations disaster when returning PKK fighters paraded victoriously on the border with Iraq. “The likelihood of a political solution is getting less and less, but it is the only way,” said Necdet Ipekyuz, a board member of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. “People are pessimistic about the future and afraid of going back to the old days.” He contrasted the Turkish government’s contacts with PKK leaders, such as Abdullah Ocalan, the organization’s imprisoned founder, with the continued arrest of Kurdish politicians and said that nearly 500 minors had been detained in the first half of the year. “There is a new generation that grew up with violence,” he said. “We shouldn’t miss this chance before it is too late.” — Financial Times Guler reported from Ankara.
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