Turkish Military Tells of Incursion Into Iraq
By SEBNEM ARSU and SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s military said Friday it had sent troops into northern Iraq on Thursday night, in a limited operation to weaken Kurdish militants there.
The Turkish military announced the operation on its Web site on Friday, but Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan later played it down, describing the mission as “limited” in size and emphasizing that the soldiers would return to Turkey “in the shortest possible time.”
Reports of the numbers of troops varied. Reuters cited Turkey’s foreign minister and an unnamed American official in Baghdad as saying that only a few hundred had been deployed, while Turkish television reported that around 10,000 troops had been deployed.
In Baghdad, Rear Admiral Gregg Smith described the incursion as “an operation of limited duration to specifically target P.K.K. terrorists in that region.”
The militants, known as the P.K.K. want greater autonomy for Turkey’s Kurdish minority and have fought the Turkish military from hideouts in both Turkey and Iraq for decades.
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