Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2004, page 58, 60

Talking Türkiye

Ankara Warns U.S. to Observe “Red Line” Around Northern Iraq’s Turkmens

By Jon Gorvett

WITH BOMBS falling on the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar in mid-September, Türkiye’s political, military and civil organizations seemed for once united in their reaction. As the largely Turkmen inhabitants of the besieged town appealed to their ethnic Turkish brethren for support, Ankara issued its strongest warning yet to Washington, and thereby highlighted a growing anxiety here over the future of northern Iraq.

“I told [U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell] that what is being done there is harming the civilian population, that it is wrong, and that if it continues, Türkiye’s cooperation on issues regarding Iraq will come to a total stop,” an unusually outspoken Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters on Sept. 13.

His comments came after U.S. and Iraqi forces had surrounded and attacked Tal Afar in what was described as an anti-terrorist operation. According to coalition officials, the town was being used as a base for militants crossing the border from nearby Syria on their way to attack coalition forces in other parts of Iraq.

In several days of fighting, involving air strikes by U.S. planes, hospitals in the town reported 56 dead, while Turkmen groups claimed 120. Hundreds more were injured. Many buildings also were destroyed and, Turkmen sources in Tal Afar told the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, electricity and water had been cut off. Several thousand Turkmens had fled into the surrounding countryside and to towns as far away as Mosul and Kirkuk.

There have been many such operations since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq back in April 2003. This, however, was the first time the country’s ethnic Turkmen population had suffered the direct effects of such assaults.

Türkiye has long seen the Turkmens, who constitute a sizeable minority in northern Iraq, as a community it is obliged to protect for historical and ethnic reasons. Indeed, for many years, Ankara had viewed them as basically Turks, arguing that the distinction between Turkmens and Turks had been introduced by the British at the end of World War I, as part of London’s justification for occupying the former Ottoman territory of Messopotamia.

Ankara also has cited protection of the Turkmens as a reason for Turkish involvement in Iraq—particularly in order to prevent northern Iraq’s large Kurdish majority from completely dominating the region. This, goes the received wisdom in Ankara, might precipitate the breakup of Türkiye’s southeast, which also has a large Kurdish population. Türkiye maintained troops in northern Iraq throughout the 1990s, and was closely involved with Turkmen organizations such as the Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF).

In the lead up to the U.S.-led invasion, Ankara warned that there was a clear “red line” around the Turkmens that the U.S. should not cross—with Türkiye’s General Staff warning that any such transgression would trigger a Turkish military intervention.

In the event, however, the “red line” was to prove quite invisible when Baghdad’s rule collapsed in northern Iraq. Kurdish forces occupied the region’s main cities, Mosul and Kirkuk, with the scant U.S. troops deployed in the region largely left looking on.

To the Turkmens, who are primarily an urban group located in these and other towns and cities, this represented a colossal disaster.

“Since last year, on April 10, the red line has been crossed,” says Asif Sertturkmen, the ITF’s London representative. “The Kurds were not supposed to enter Kirkuk, but tens of thousands of them did. The first thing they did was destroy all the land and property registration offices.”

Now, with elections due in Iraq come January, Turkmen groups allege that Kurdish groups have been moving even more people into Kirkuk in order to alter irreversibly the city’s ethnic balance, further marginalizing the large Turkmen population there.

It is an allegation apparently supported by U.S. military sources as well. A mid-September AP report quoted U.S. Army Major Mike Davey of the 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division in Kirkuk as saying that some 20,000 Kurds had arrived in the city in August alone. “They want this area back,” Davey said of the Kurds. “It’s a very visible presence.”

Yet, as is often the case, the ethnic argument depends a great deal on the ethnicity of those advancing it. The two main Kurdish parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), point out that, prior to the U.S.-led invasion, the Baghdad regime had followed a policy of Arabization in Kirkuk and other towns in the region.

This had led to an altering of the ethnic balance in favor of Arabs, who had been given land and other incentives throughout northern Iraq in order to marginalize the Kurdish and other populations. Many Kurds had left Kirkuk and other settlements as a result of this policy—and now they are moving back.

The ITF’s Sertturkmen challenges this view. “Up to the 1940s,” he said, “towns like Kirkuk and Erbil had Turkmen majorities. Not anymore. Now, if you go to Kirkuk, there are Kurdish flags everywhere. Ask a Kurdish taxi driver for some address and he won’t have any idea where it is, as he doesn’t come from there. Before, 30 of the local districts were Turkmen, now it’s only one. In Tal Afar, for example, there used to be a Turkmen mayor, but he’s now been replaced by a Kurdish one.”

In this context of ethnic tension, it is perhaps little surprise that the battle of Tal Afar has been seen by many Turkmens—and Turks—as the latest development in a Kurdish policy of changing the ethnic balance of the region. The operation forced many Turkmens to flee, while, many here argue, also delivering a message that the Kurds have the backing of the U.S., while the Turkmens are on their own.

Such arguments also underline how little faith is placed in official U.S. explanations for operations in Iraq these days. Few seem to credit the idea that this was an anti-terrorist operation.

“There were no problems before,” according to Suphi Saatci, general secretary of the Kirkuk Foundation, a Turkmen group in Türkiye. “Turkmens had never been a problem for the U.S. forces, and this was clearly a Turkmen town. Using claims of terrorism, they went in and killed people.”

Gul’s warning also may have had some effect. The day after his remarks, the U.S. announced an end to its operation. Türkiye plays a vital logistical role in supplying U.S. forces, with convoys of trucks crossing over from Türkiye to northern Iraq every day. Kidnappings and executions of Turkish drivers by Iraqi militant groups also have been borne by Türkiye, although some Turkish trucking companies have pulled out as a result.

Yet, as in 2003, the question remains how far Ankara might really be prepared to go over the Turkmens. The answer to that may largely depend on the extent of the veracity of Turkmen claims of ethnic cleansing, and whether current friction explodes into something far more dangerous and damaging.

“Kirkuk is the key to avoiding civil war in Iraq,” Lt. Col. Jim Stock of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division recently told AP. “Kirkuk is to Iraq what Kosovo is to the Balkans.”

A very worrying thought for Ankara—as well as for the coalition and Iraqi authorities.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.