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Iraq blocks Turkish forces

Turkey and the US have scrapped plans to send Turkish troops to Iraq, a setback for US policy after Washington failed to break resistance to the deployment from Iraq's governing council.

Friday's announcement deprived the US of a much-needed foreign force to contain an increasingly violent insurgency in Iraq. The Bush administration has been pressing Turkey for months to send what would be the first major Muslim contingent of peacekeepers.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul agreed in a telephone conversation Thursday night that the offer of Turkish troops would be withdrawn, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

Without elaborating, Boucher said that the "sensitivities" of the situation prompted the decision.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said in Washington that Vice President Dick Cheney talked on the phone Friday morning with the Turkish prime minister to discuss the two countries' relations in the wake of the decision. He did not elaborate.

The Pentagon had been counting on a third multinational division, possibly led by Turkey. The Turkish parliament voted last month to allow the country's troops to join the US-led occupation of its southeastern neighbor. Turkey was expected to send some 10,000 soldiers and become the third-largest force in Iraq after Britain.

Turkish officials hoped that joining US-led forces would mend strained ties with Washington after Ankara's refusal to let US troops invade Iraq from Turkish soil in March, as well as giving Turkey a chance to have a say on the future of Iraq, and contain the Kurdish rebel threat from bases in northern Iraq.

Iraqis, however, strongly objected to the Turkish troops because of sensitivities to the legacy of nearly 400 years of Ottoman rule in Iraq until World War I. Turks are mostly Sunni Muslims, and their predecessors, the Ottomans, favored Iraq's Sunnis while ruling over one of the world's great empires. They sidelined members of the Shiite Muslim sect, a majority in Iraq.

Additionally, Iraqi Kurds feared that Turks would threaten their self-rule in northern Iraq. A 15-year insurgency by Kurdish rebels in Turkey ended in 1999, but the rebels have bases in northern Iraq and the potential to resume fighting.

The US Defense Department announced plans on Thursday to alert an additional 43,000 National Guard and Reserve support troops that they may be sent to Iraq.

The Turkish government's highly unpopular decision to send troops to Iraq was fueled by concerns of repairing ties with Washington, a key supporter of Turkey's battered economy and its ill-fated EU candidacy.

"We said from the beginning that we were not too eager anyway [about sending troops],'' Gul said. "We had said we would send if our contribution would be of use. We saw that this is not the situation. That's why we took this decision."

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan added that Friday's decision was consistent with what the government had said earlier. "Remember, after the parliamentary discussion on Oct. 7, we said the decision does not mean that we will send soldiers there tomorrow," Erdogan said.

The decision is not likely to strain ties between Washington and Turkey, NATO's only Muslim member.

Market analysts expected that the US would still provide the US$8.5 billion loan promised for Turkey's "cooperation in Iraq."
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