Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer last week reaffirmed his support for Iraq’s territorial integrity during talks with visiting Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
Sezer told a press conference here that “Turkey gives utmost importance to the territorial integrity and national unity of Iraq”, which is under the threat of becoming the next target in the US-led anti-terror drive, a move Turkey opposes.
He urged Baghdad to cooperate with the United Nations and the international community in a bid to end the “suffering of the people of Iraq”, which has been under an international embargo for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Sezer and Sheikh Hamad also appealed to the Israelis and the Palestinians to end spiralling violence in the Middle East and return to the negotiating table.
Since the events of September 11 in the United States, Turkey, the only member of NATO with a mainly-Moslem population, has opposed extending the US-led war against terrorism especially to Iraq, its southern neighbor.
Turkey says destabilizing Iraq could create on its border an independent Kurdish state in mountainous Northern Iraq, which has been under the control of two Kurdish factions since the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
Such a state would in turn fan separatist-minded tendencies among Kurds living mainly in Turkey’s Southeast, which borders Iraq and Syria.
The banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fought Ankara for 15 years for Kurdish self-rule in the Southeast until 1999 when it said it was abandoning its armed campaign for a democractic solution to the Kurdish question.
In late November, Turkey’s Defense Minister Sabahattin Cakmakoglu said that Ankara could re-evaluate its position in the case of evidence linking Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein with terrorism.
But in remarks to the media last week, the chief of the Turkish army voiced strong opposition to extending the US campaign to Iraq on the grounds that it could create a Kurdish state.
Generak Huseyin Kivrikoglu also warned that a military intervention in Iraq would have far graver economic consequences for Turkey than the effects of the 1991 Gulf War.
Ankara estimates it lost 35 million dollars, mostly from lost sales of oil, since the beginning of the UN embargo against Iraq.
Turkey was the second stop of a regional tour which had already taken Sheikh Hamad to Russia. He was scheduled to travel on to Egypt and Algeria.
The US weekly Newsweek has said top American officials are studying the possibility of invading Iraq from both the North and the South in order to topple the regime of President, Saddam Hussein.
Under heavy political pressure, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been looking at a study that suggests deploying 50,000 US troops on Iraq’s southern border and another 50,000 on its northern border, according to the report in an issue due out last week.
The plan calls for sending the two armies towards Baghdad simultaneously, but strategists doubt that even that force would be enough to take the Iraqi capital, Newsweek said.
Lieutenant-General Paul Mikolashek, commander of US ground forces in the region, believes taking Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein would require forces “at least at the level” of Desert Storm -- when around 169,000 US combat troops were deployed to eject Iraq from Kuwait, according to the report.
But President George W. Bush and his national security team have decided that Saddam has to go, said the magazine quoting unnamed US officials.
“The question is not whether the United States is going to hit Iraq; the question is when”, the report quoted a senior US envoy in the Middle East as saying.
RUSSO-US IMPASSE
In a related development, Moscow has said it failed to reach agreement with Washington on a new sanctions regime for Iraq and remained “categorically” opposed to military strikes to oust Saddam.
“The Russian side is categorically against conducting a military operation in regards to Baghdad in the framework of the next phase in the fight against international terrorism”, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ordzhonikidze said in a statement.
The Foreign Ministry added that Russian negotiators and visiting US Assistant Secretary of State John Stern Wolf had only reached agreement on “certain questions” during two-day talks in Moscow about a new Iraqi sanctions regime.
US officials in Moscow issued no comment following the talks and Wolf left Russia without speaking to the press.
The impasse -- if only temporary -- over Russia’s Soviet-era ally came amid growing speculation that the United States was on the verge of expanding its target list in the global war on terrorism which has focussed on Afghanistan for the past two months.
Russian officials had earlier said that Moscow was willing to listen to US arguments in favor of broadening the terror hit-list before making its own final judgement on the issue.
But the two-day talks with Wolf appeared to confirm Russia’s primary desire to secure nearly a billion dollars in Iraqi trade agreements that remain frozen by existing UN sanctions rather than giving its nod to military strikes on Baghdad.
Moscow said it “had expressed its concern” that the value of Russia-Iraq contracts frozen by the United Nations had grown to 860 million dollars.
The statement noted that Washington had promised to help “unfreeze” contracts worth only a fraction of that sum -- 54 million dollars -- and that a new round of consultations would be held by early February.
These were timed to come before the existing UN oil-for-food program for Iraq expires at the end of May.
Russian officials responsible for trade with Iraq, which has been characterized as a “rogue state” by Washington, meanwhile expressed dismay at what they described as an arbitrary trade sanctions regime with Baghdad.
Yevgeni Yagupets, a spokesman for Russia’s chief committee for economic cooperation for Iraq, said the UN sanctions committee was primarily suspicious about contracts which supplied Baghdad with civilian-use equipment for factories built during the Soviet era.
“Russia wants all sanctions lifted once Iraq admits UN weapons inspectors”, Yagupets said. Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen have all been mentioned as possible targets for future US military action.
US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has opined that “the world and Iraq will live better without Saddam Hussein in power”.
After initially refusing to support a UN sanctions review against Iraq, Russia last month said it would support the initiative while stressing the importance of persuading Baghdad to allow the United Nations to resume arms inspections.
UN inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in December 1998, on the eve of a bombing campaign by US and British warplanes, and were not allowed to return.
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