SULAYMANIYA, Iraq — Turkey unleashed air and artillery strikes against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq on Wednesday, officials said, five days after the Turks completed a major ground offensive in the mountainous border region.
Turkey declared at the time that it had achieved its goal of denying the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a free hand to attack its territory from sanctuaries in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region.
But U.S. and Turkish military analysts were skeptical that the operation would have more than a temporary effect.
On Wednesday, Turkish warplanes crossed about 15 miles inside Iraq to bomb targets in the Dashti Barzji area, north of the city of Dahuk, said Capt. Mohammed Ali, a member of the Kurdish security forces in northern Iraq. Artillery strikes were reported around Amadiya in the same area, he said. The attacks took place in a sparsely populated region and caused no civilian casualties, Ali said.
Ahmed Denis, a PKK spokesman, confirmed that the attack occurred and that the group has a presence in the area but said he had received no reports of damage or casualties.
Domestic critics had accused Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan of bowing to pressure from the United States to wrap up the ground offensive as quickly as possible, charges denied by the Turkish government. The eight-day incursion placed the United States in an awkward position as it attempted to juggle the interests of two allies.
The U.S. regards the PKK as a terrorist group and has supplied Turkey with intelligence about the rebels’ operations in Iraq. But American officials don’t want to upset stability in the Kurdish north, which has escaped much of the violence plaguing the rest of Iraq.
Iraqi officials reacted angrily to the incursion, which they called a violation of sovereignty, and said there were other ways to deal with the PKK. President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, is expected to visit Turkey on Friday.
Meanwhile, the top two U.S. officials in Iraq said Iran was still training Iraqi Shiite Muslim militias, in violation of its promises to Iraqi leaders.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to halt all support of extremist Shiite militias, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told McClatchy Newspapers on Wednesday.
But Petraeus said the U.S. military continued to capture Iranian-trained militants and to sustain attacks from insurgents using Iranian-made weapons.
“There is no question that Iran has continued to train the so-called special groups,” Petraeus said, referring to what the U.S. military calls “rogue” elements of the militia that’s loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muq tada al-Sadr.
“We have individuals in detention, and have detained them fairly recently, who had explained how they received the training, the whole process for going to and from Iran,” he said.
U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker made a similar point in an interview Tuesday. “We believe they continue to train the Iraqis,” he said. “We know it because we picked up some of these guys and they told us they’ve been trained in Iran.”
U.S. and Iranian officials have met three times with Iraqi aides to discuss security in Iraq, but the talks stalled after the last meeting, in August. Crocker said the Iranians had postponed the meetings as many as three times and that it was uncertain when the next round of talks would be.
