ANKARA, TURKEY — The Turkish parliament overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to authorize cross-border military attacks in northern Iraq against Kurdish separatist rebels, as world leaders pleaded for restraint.
Lawmakers voted 507 to 19 to give Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan permission to order strategic strikes or large-scale invasions of Iraq over the next year. Erdogan has said he will not order an immediate attack.
Throughout 2 1/2 hours of debate, legislators expressed frustration that the United States and Iraq have not kept promises to curb the activities of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, which the United States and the European Union have classified as a terrorist organization.
As the votes were tallied in Turkey’s modernistic legislative chamber, President Bush told reporters at the White House that “we are making it very clear to Turkey that we don’t think it is in their interest to send troops into Iraq.”
In the hours leading up to the vote, Turkish leaders were besieged with telephone calls from around the globe, imploring against military action on the grounds that it could inflame the only relatively stable region of war-ravaged Iraq.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki telephoned Erdogan, asking for more time to take action against PKK rebels who have largely been allowed to operate freely in northern Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. He said he has given “strict instructions” to the regional Kurdish administration in Iraq’s north to crack down on PKK operations and said Iraqi forces could join the Turkish army in military operations “if necessary,” according to the Anatolian news agency.
Erdogan’s office denied there was an offer of joint military action.
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer phoned Turkish President Abdullah Gul and urged Turkey to “exercise the greatest possible restraint, particularly in this time of great tension,” James Appathurai, a spokesman for the alliance, said at a briefing in Brussels, Belgium. Turkey has the second-largest military in NATO.
Gul rebuffed Scheffer, according to Turkish accounts, echoing the comments of many lawmakers during Wednesday’s legislative debate in saying, “Terrorism cannot be presented as excusable in any way, and Turkey will obviously take any measure to stop these heinous attacks,” Turkish news agencies reported.
Only the small, pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party opposed the parliamentary resolution, arguing that military action would worsen the economic plight of Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast.
Some Turkish officials and military experts warned that the military would face serious obstacles in all types of cross-border action, including many of the same problems the U.S. military has experienced in Iraq.
