BAD NEWS: Iranians attack Kurdish rebels in Iraq

why is it bad news?
The Iranians are defending their borders.

So, how far into Iraq do their borders extend?

As far as American borders in Iraq........ :wink:
If the US administration can invade Iraq across sea and desert to protect its borders, why cant the Iranians?

This may be just the pretence the imbecile in the White House needs to start his desired Iranian conflict.

Thats unlikely, on that pretext. One of the problems with the Iraq war is the instability created for Turkey a NATO alley wuth respect to Kurdistan issue, we cant condemn the Iranians when we have given a green light to the Turks.

Turkey is not prepared to entertain a Kurdistan any more than Iran is.......

This is what the Kurds want

Iraq Minister Demands Iran Stop Shelling Kurdish Towns
September 4, 2007
Iraqi Foreign Minister Demands That Iran Stop Shelling of Kurdish Area in North
By JAMES GLANZ
New York Times

TEHRAN ?- Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, delivered a strongly worded demand to Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other Iranian officials here on Monday to halt the shelling of a mountainous border region in Iraq's north, where Mr. Zebari said the bombardment has driven as many as 3,000 Kurdish villagers from their homes and set orchards and fields ablaze.

Mr. Zebari said in an interview that the Iranians, who have refused to acknowledge publicly that the shelling was taking place, did not dispute his account.

He said the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, described the shelling as Iran's response to guerrilla attacks against it by a group that is opposed to the Iranian government and is believed to have bases on the Iraqi side of the border.

Members of that group, Pezak, have claimed responsibility for attacks inside Iran, and they are believed to have shot down at least one Iranian helicopter in recent months. But Mr. Zebari said the shelling of the villages was indiscriminate and was achieving little against Pezak positions, and he made clear that Iraqi patience was wearing thin with the bombardment, which has taken place intermittently for about two weeks.

"In a normal relationship between two countries, this amounts to an act of aggression," Mr. Zebari said.

Although Mr. Zebari conceded in the interview that the conflict in Iraq made this time far from ordinary, his words were likely to be sobering against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, during which millions died.

In a news briefing during President Bush's visit to Iraq on Monday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki also discussed the situation in the north and suggested that Turkey too was shelling across the border into Iraq.

Before Turkish elections last month, Turkey's military staged an enormous troop buildup on its border and by some accounts was on the verge of a major attack, citing incursions by Kurdish armed groups from Iraq into Turkey. Some of those groups are believed to favor an independent Kurdish nation that would include parts of Kurd-dominated southern Turkey.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests in Tehran on Monday by The New York Times for comment on the bombardments, and a Times reporter accompanying the Iraqi foreign minister was effectively barred from a diplomatic conference attended by Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Mottaki.

The Iraqi government had previously sent an official letter of protest to Iran about the shelling. But the Iraqi ambassador to Iran, Mohammad Majid al-Sheikh, said Monday that Iran had ignored that letter.

"We have not received any sensible response from them," Mr. Sheikh said. "We demand that they respond to our protest."

As senior government officials discussed the attacks, poor villagers in the area, which is north and east of the provincial capitals of Erbil and Sulaimaniya, were paying the price. On Monday, Awella Saleem, 62, returned to his largely destroyed house near the border. He said his family was inside when bombs started falling several days ago.

"We survived by coincidence, and two of our family were injured," Mr. Saleem said. "Why are we under such a savage attack by Iran? There is nobody in our village who would harm Iran."

Officials in the Kurdish Regional Government and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, a relief organization, said that about 500 families had been displaced by the bombing, figures that were generally consistent with the estimates by Mr. Zebari, who is Kurdish. Othman Haji Mahmoud, the interior minister for the regional government, said last week that the government denounced the bombing and offered to open direct talks with Iran on the subject.

Members of Pezak are said to be Iranian Kurds essentially seeking autonomy for Kurds in Iran. How long their cross-border incursions have been taking place is not known.

Senior Iraqi government officials suspect that the Iranian shelling may be in part a response to American assertions that Iran is supplying deadly weaponry to armed groups, particularly Shiite militias, in Iraq.

The United States has demanded that Iran stop supporting the armed groups, and now Iran is demanding that Iraq and the United States stop the Pezak attacks. Privately, Iran has said it believes the United States could be backing the Pezak group, an assertion that could not be confirmed late Monday.

Mr. Zebari said that controlling the group should fall to Iraqi government forces, in particular the Kurd-dominated national army in the northern region.

But with so many of those troops committed to security operations in the unstable center of Iraq, the northern government was short of troops to send to the border regions, he said.

In an interview near the border on Monday, Hawere Kareme, who described himself as a Pezak official, asserted that Iran was aiming to empty the border villages of Kurds and fill them with what he called Islamic extremists.

The sectarian tension between Kurds, who are generally Sunni, and Arab and Iranian Shiites is high in the area, adding yet another troubling dimension to the Iraq conflict.

"Iran wants to destroy what the Kurds of Iraq have built and destabilize the province," Mr. Kareme said. "Take a look at our headquarters and our fighters in the Kandeel Mountains; none of them was injured. These villages are far from our activities and movements, but Iran shells it fiercely."
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Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from northern Iraq.

Homepage Iraqi villagers say rebels Iran seeks are near
Iraqi villagers say rebels Iran seeks are near
By Jay Price | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Monday, September 24, 2007

KOZENA, Iraq ?- Mohammed Ahmed Aziz and the other Kurdish villagers are in the heart of one of the world's oddest diplomatic tangles.

The parties including five countries, a semi-autonomous region that acts like a country, at least two groups of Kurdish fighters branded as terrorists and two ongoing border skirmishes.

Most of that doesn't interest Aziz and his extended family of 18. They have more pressing problems: Last week, an Iranian rocket hit the mountaintop above their mud-and-twig-roofed house, scorching a shopping center-sized patch of the crown.

"We decided at that moment to move," he said. "But then the shooting stopped again, so I don't know what we will do."

For more than a month, Iran has been raining down mortar rounds on villages in the border area, complaining that they've become a refuge for Kurdish rebels operating in Iran from the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PEJAK).

The group is a branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which for years has been blamed for terrorist attacks in Turkey in its quest for a Kurdish homeland.

The PKK is on the State Department's list of international terrorist organizations, but in this part of Iraq ?- where Kurds have established an autonomous regional government ?- the PKK and PEJAK are tolerated.

The man who's essentially the defense minister for Iraq's Kurdistan regional government said in an interview that Kurdish leaders had no interest in sending the region's crack militia, the peshmerga, after the PKK or PEJAK. The peshmerga's name translates as "those who face death."

"We don't believe in fighting them," said Jafar Mustafa Ali, the minister of state for peshmerga affairs. "We are trying to prevent a fight against anyone. If we find them in our territory, we would make them leave."

He said that if Iran and Turkey wanted to fight the groups, they should do so within their own borders.

"If you fight them, they will just get stronger, because they have something to believe in," he said.

Kurds are spread across Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq.

None of those nations wants to give up territory to create a country called Kurdistan, though the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq has been operating almost as if it were a nation for more than a decade.

Turkey and Iran have accused the Iraqi Kurds of protecting the Kurdish rebel groups. Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, has demanded that the U.S., which has only a small military presence in northern Iraq, do something to stop the PKK.

Iran accuses the United States of supporting PEJAK, and the issue seems destined to get tangled up in the U.S.-Iranian rivalry in Iraq, where the American military seized an Iranian member of a trade delegation last week in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.

The U.S. said the man had smuggled sophisticated, armor-piercing roadside bombs into Iraq, but the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, demanded the Iranian's release, saying he was in Iraq by invitation. On Thursday, Iran closed at least four border crossings into northern Iraq in protest.

Last week, at the final peshmerga checkpoint before the villages and the Iranian border, the commander confirmed that PEJAK and PKK fighters are operating in Kurdish Iraq. Four times he warned a group of journalists that the groups' fighters were in the mountains just beyond the post and that he couldn't help if they went farther and something went wrong.

The shelling, which started Aug. 16, has assumed a pattern. It starts every two or three days and stops, then starts again, said Ali, the peshmerga minister.

No one's been killed so far, but two women have been wounded, and Aziz said the occupants of eight villages had been forced from their homes.

"We're trying hard to prevent the use of additional force," Ali said. "We'll try to find a diplomatic way.

"War would be the last choice, because every single battle is not to anyone's benefit."

For the villagers, it's hell now.

The first rounds Aug. 16 fell near Kozena, where Aziz lives. Then the Iranians began targeting other villages.

Aziz agrees that there are PEJAK fighters in the area, but said the shelling was hurting only the village families that weren't involved. One remote village among the group that's closest to Iran, tiny Zerkam, has nearly been destroyed.

"Every day, it seems like, they get hit two times, maybe three times," Aziz said.

Zerkam's residents, like most of those from the seven other villages, have moved out of their homes to live alongside their cattle under the stunted trees that dot the mountainsides. Among them are more than a dozen of Aziz's relatives, he said.

"They are scattered all over these mountains now," he said.

Kozena is farther from the border, and somewhat safer, but Aziz isn't sure it's safe enough.

Every time he hears mortar fire, he wonders whether it's time to leave, after spending all 53 years of his life among these mountains.

"If it gets worse, we will have to go," he said. "Where, I'm not sure yet, but we don't want to die."
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(Price reports for The (Raleigh) News & Observer. McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent Yasseen Taha contributed to this story.)

What Turkey Wants From Iraq -- and the US
SPIEGEL ONLINE - October 18, 2007, 11:14 AM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,512175,00.html

WAR DRUMS IN ANKARA
What Turkey Wants From Iraq -- and the US
By Jürgen Gottschlich in Istanbul

The Turkish parliament granted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday the right to order a military strike in neighboring Iraq. It's potentially a blank check for a new Iraq war -- but for now, the war drums are a way to underline Turkey's demands.

The words "War Drums in Ankara " were emblazoned across today's front page of Radikal, the center-left Turkish daily. A few hours later, the Turkish parliament reached a historic decision. For the first time since the invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the parliament has authorized a government to send troops into a neighboring country.

With an overwhelming majority of 507 votes (out of 550), the delegates to the Turkish Grand National Assembly handed the government a blank check, valid for one year, to order the army to conduct operations in northern Iraq.

Only 19 parliamentarians from the Kurdish DTP Party voted openly against the measure. Prime Minister Erdogan had insisted on an open vote. "The world should see how our parliament feels," was Erdogan's official reason, but the real intent was to shine a spotlight on the Kurdish faction.

The Erdogan government had expected for days that all the remaining parties would vote in favor of military action. "Our patience has come to an end," Erdogan said on the day before the vote, summarizing the general mood. "If Iraq wishes to prevent a Turkish military campaign, it must take clear action against the PKK," the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party. Iraqi Kurds, in particular, Erdogan said, must "build a wall between them and the PKK." The threat of military action triggered a wave of hectic diplomatic activity in both Washington and Baghdad.

A Strategic Mess for America

US President George W. Bush has switched to crisis management mode. Over the weekend, Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman, a former US ambassador to Ankara who knows Turkey well, and Assistant Secretary of State Dan Fried met with senior Turkish government officials. Bush himself emphasized in public on Wednesday that sending troops to Iraq would not be in Turkey's best interest. But the truth is that nothing could be worse for American interests than a new battle front in the only stabilized part of Iraq.

Trouble has been brewing for a while, though. In the past few weeks alone, 30 soldiers have died in attacks and direct military clashes with PKK militants. "We can no longer tolerate the fact that the United States and the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq have done nothing against the PKK and still want to prevent us from attacking the PKK camps in northern Iraq ourselves. If this means that relations with the United States will suffer, then that is something we will have to accept. We are prepared to pay the price," said Erdogan.

Ankara's irritation with the US and the Iraqi government extends beyond their tolerance of the PKK. Turkey is also incensed over a decision by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which, after years of debate, voted to recommend to the US Congress that it classify the 1915 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide, a term Turkey strictly rejects when it comes to defining the pogroms of the day.

If the US Congress accepts the resolution, Turkish General Chief of Staff Yasar Büyükanit said in an interview over the weekend, "military relations between Turkey and the United States will never be the same." Washington is apparently taking Ankara's threat seriously. An ultra-nationalist party, the MHP, is already calling on the government to close both the US air base at Incirlik in southern Turkey and its borders to Iraq.

Both actions would deal a severe blow to US troops in Iraq. The Pentagon processes close to 70 percent of its entire re-supply effort through Incirlik, and at least a quarter of the gasoline the US Army consumes is brought into Iraq on tanker trucks from Turkey. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is already looking into alternate routes through Jordan and Kuwait, despite the fact that both would be inconvenient and dangerous.

For Bush, a great deal hinges on whether he manages to convince his Kurdish allies in northern Iraq to curtail the Kurdish-Turkish PKK's attacks in Turkey, at least temporarily. Turkish government spokesman Cemil Cicek said yesterday: "Our hope is that we will not have to use this motion, but it is clear that an invasion will follow the next spectacular attack by the PKK."

What Turkey Might Do

The Turkish army denies having prepared an invasion plan, but three military options have been discussed in the media. The most comprehensive is an advance by about 20,000 troops to a line about 40 kilometers (25 miles) across the border, the goal being to create a buffer zone in northern Iraq designed to prevent PKK militants from making any further raids inside Turkey. A second option would involve a temporary invasion to attack PKK camps in northern Iraq and destroy the guerillas' logistics, then withdraw to Turkish territory. A third option would be to amass more troops along the Turkish side of the border and launch air strikes into northern Iraq.

For now, the war drums are mainly intended to put the necessary weight behind Turkey's political demands. Erdogan is aware of the costs of invading northern Iraq. Ambassadors from the European Union nations were summoned to the foreign ministry in Ankara this morning to listen to Turkey's position.

But the key political meeting will take place on Nov. 5. Erdogan still plans to sit down on that day with President Bush, although a handful of hardliners in his own party have pushed him to cancel the meeting. Officials in Ankara no longer believe that Bush has the power to dampen congressional enthusiasm for the Armenian genocide resolution, but Erdogan wants to hold Washington to its promise that the US Army and Iraqi Kurds will move against the PKK in northern Iraq. If he returns from Washington empty-handed, though, the prime minister will hardly be able to hold back the Turkish military.
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Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Maybe I'll take up smoking and cocaine again.... why not?