Kurds say Turkey bombed enclave

SULAYMANIYA, IRAQ — Turkey unleashed air and artillery strikes against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq on Wednesday, officials in this Kurdish city 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 had a presence in the area, but said he had received no reports of damage or casualties. He said the rebel group expected further attacks.

“The [Kurdistan] Workers Party believes that the [Turkish] withdrawal wasn’t permanent but, rather, temporary,” Denis said by telephone.

Turkey did not immediately confirm Wednesday’s attacks.

Domestic critics had accused Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep 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.

“We don’t want Kurdistan territory to be used as a place to settle their internal conflicts,” said Jabbar Yawir, undersecretary for northern Iraq’s Kurdish security force, known as the peshmerga.

The Turkish government has been locked in conflict with the PKK since the group took up arms in 1984 over demands for Kurdish autonomy in southeast Turkey. The conflict has claimed as many as 40,000 lives, most of them Kurds.

In a report for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, military expert Anthony Cordesman said Turkey may have inflicted enough casualties during its recent ground assault in the mountainous north to affect the PKK’s ability to attack when the snow melts this spring. But, he said, “it is remarkably difficult to attack any guerrilla network to the point that it cannot still carry out large-scale, showpiece acts of terrorism.”

Cordesman suggested that motives for the incursion may have been more strategic than tactical. Among other things, Turkey has signaled to the U.S. and Iraqi Kurds that it will not sit passively while nothing is done about the PKK threat against Turkish forces and civilians.

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Special correspondent Ahmed reported from Sulaymaniya and Times staff writer Zavis from Baghdad.