US defence chief warns Turkey on attacking Kurds

Pentagon chief Robert Gates said he saw little sense in air strikes or major ground assaults by US or Turkish forces against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq until more is known about their locations along the border.

His comments to reporters during a break in a Nato defence ministers meeting in the Netherlands yesterday suggested concern that Turkey will open a large-scale offensive across the border into the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

That area has been one of the most prosperous and peaceful parts of Iraq in recent years.

Turkish warplanes and helicopter gunships reportedly attacked positions of Kurdish rebels just inside Turkey earlier yesterday, and Turkish leaders in Ankara discussed the scope and duration of a possible offensive.

Turkey’s leaders face demands at home to stage an offensive in northern Iraq.

Rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party – known as the PKK – rest, train and get supplies in relative safety in the area before returning to Turkey to conduct attacks in support of their goal of autonomy in southeastern Turkey.

At a news conference in the seaside village of Noordwijk, where defence ministers of all 26 Nato member countries gathered to discuss their efforts in Afghanistan, Gates was asked to assess the prospects of the US military launching air strikes in support of Turkey’s efforts against the Kurdish rebels.

“Without good intelligence, just sending large numbers of troops across the border (from Turkey) or dropping bombs doesn’t seem to make much sense to me,” Gates said.

The defence secretary was questioned about whether his sense of the limitations on effective military action applied to US as well as Turkish strikes. “For anybody,” he said.

Adm. Michael Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas that the border situation is complex and any incursions across it would be a difficult undertaking.

Asked later whether the US is considering air strikes, Mullen said he would not disclose any military options at this point.

“It’s a pretty tough area. It’s a pretty mountainous area,” the senior military adviser to the Bush administration told reporters. “Nothing would be simple.”

In Washington, Pentagon officials said they could not confirm news reports of airstrikes.

“I don’t know of any Turkish airstrikes in that area today,” Major General Richard Sherlock, Joint Chiefs of Staff operational planning director, said at a Defence Department press conference.

Separately, a senior defence official said there is increasing frustration at the highest reaches of the Bush administration with the Turkey-Iraq situation; that the Iraqis understand this; and that there is growing sympathy with the Turkish position that something has to be done.

The official said the US military believes the Turks would “like to avoid a cross-border military operation on the ground if they could”.

He suggested Turkey hopes “others will take ... tangible and concrete action to help preclude that.”

The official cited ways of curtailing the rebels’ movement and making it more difficult to operate across the border.“

In congressional testimony yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Iraqis are taking steps to crack down on Kurdish rebels.

The US has told Turkey that retaliatory attacks would have a “destabilising effect”, she said.

Few of the US military forces in Iraq are along the border with Turkey, but there is ample air power available. US officials have said repeatedly in recent days that US forces are tied up with the long-running fight against insurgents and the al Qaida in Iraq group elsewhere in the country.

At the outset of yesterday’s Nato meeting, the alliance’s top diplomat, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer of the Netherlands, said Turkey is showing “remarkable restraint” in the Kurdish matter. He said the 26 allies expressed solidarity with Turkey in the face of the attacks by rebels.