Category: Iraq

Turkish jets hit PKK camps in northern Iraq

Thursday, May 20, 2010

ANKARA – Hürriyet Daily News

Turkish fighters have launched an aerial attack against outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, targets in northern Iraq, the private channel NTV reported late Thursday.

It said 20 fighters hit around 50 points in the Hakurk and Zap region, without detailing the specific targets and damage given.

The attack came a day after Turkey’s top envoy in Baghdad, Murat Özçelik, met with Massoud Barzani, head of the Regional Kurdish Administration.

Hurriyet Daily News

May 20, 2010
Israel Will Strike Iran Before November

Former Def. Minister: Israel Will Attack Iran by Nov.

Friday, 02 Apr 2010 12:36 PM

By: Ken Timmerman

Israel will be compelled to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities by this November unless the U.S. and its allies enact “crippling sanctions that will undermine the regime in Tehran,” former deputy defense minister Brig. Gen. Ephraim Sneh said on Wednesday in Tel Aviv.

The sanctions currently being discussed with Russia, China, and other major powers at the United Nations are likely to be a slightly-enhanced version of the U.N. sanctions already in place, which have had no impact on the Iranian regime.

And despite unanimous passage of the Iran Petroleum Sanctions Act in January, the Obama administration continues to resist efforts by Congress to impose mandatory sanctions on companies selling refined petroleum products to Iran.

In an Op-Ed in the Israeli left-wing daily, Haaretz, Sneh argues that Iran will probably have “a nuclear bomb or two” by 2011.

“An Israeli military campaign against Iran’s nuclear installations is likely to cripple that country’s nuclear project for a number of years. The retaliation against Israel would be painful, but bearable.”

Sneh believes that the “acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran during Obama’s term would do him a great deal of political damage,” but that the damage to Obama resulting from an Israeli strike on Iran “would be devastating.”

Nevertheless, he writes, “for practical reasons, in the absence of genuine sanctions, Israel will not be able to wait until the end of next winter, which means it would have to act around the congressional elections in November, thereby sealing Obama’s fate as president.”

Sneh does not foresee any U.S. military strikes on Iran, an analysis that is shared by most observers in Washington, who see the Obama administration moving toward containment as opposed to confrontation with Iran.

In a recent report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), military analyst Anthony Cordesman concluded that Israel will have to use low-yield earth-penetrating nuclear weapons if it wants to take out deeply-buried nuclear sites in Iran.

“Israel is reported to possess a 200 kilogram nuclear warhead containing 6 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium that could be mounted on the sea launched cruise missiles and producing a Yield of 20 kilo tons,” Cordesman writes in the CSIS study he co-authored by Abdullah Toukan.

Israel would be most likely to launch these missiles from its Dolphin-class submarines, he added.

While Sneh is no longer in the Israeli government, his revelation of a drop-dead date for an Israeli military strike on Iran must be taken seriously, Israel-watchers in the U.S. tell Newsmax.

“Ephraim Sneh is a serious guy,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “He was deputy minister of defense and has long been focused on the issue of Iran.”

Shoshana Bryen, Senior Director for Security Policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), said that what struck her most about Sneh’s comments was the shift of emphasis from resolving the Palestinian problem to Iran.

“For 30 years, he’s been saying that solving the Palestinian problem is Israel’s biggest priority. Now he’s saying, forget about the Palestinians. Iran is the problem.”

Sneh “is extremely well regarded on the left and the right,” she added. “People respect him enormously.”

In his Op-Ed, Sneh argues that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to mend its bridges with the United States, and the only way to do so is by enacting an immediate and total ban on any settlement activity, including in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

“Without international legitimacy, and with its friend mad at it, Israel would find it very difficult to act on its own” against Iran, he argued.

========================================

Efraim Sneh (Hebrew: אפרים סנה‎, born 19 September 1944)^[1] is an Israeli politician and physician. He has been a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party and served briefly in the current Government as Deputy Defense Minister. He currently heads the Yisrael Hazaka party, which he established in May 2008.

[edit] Biography

Born in Tel Aviv in 1944,^[2] Sneh is the son of Moshe Sneh, who was one of the heads of the Haganah. His father was elected to the first Knesset as a representative of Mapam, before defecting to Maki, the Israeli Communist Party.

Sneh served in the Nahal infantry battalion from 1962 to 1964. He studied medicine at Tel Aviv University and specialized in internal medicine. Once he finished his studies he returned to military service as a battalion doctor, then as a brigade doctor for the Paratroopers Brigade. In the Yom Kippur War he commanded a medical unit of the brigade in the Battle of The Chinese Farm and battles west of the Suez canal. Sneh also commanded the medical unit at Operation Entebbe, served as commander of the elite Unit 669 and as commander of the security zone in south Lebanon. His last role in the IDF was as head of the civilian administration of the West Bank.^[3]

In December 1987, with his release from the army he joined the Labor Party. From 1988 to 1994 he served on many delegations, specifically dealing with the Palestinian leadership. In 1992 Sneh was elected to the Knesset, serving as Minister of Health from 1994 to 1996. In 1999 he was appointed Deputy Minister of Defense, and in 2001 he was appointed Minister of Transportation.^[3]

Sneh stood out in his objection to the withdrawal from southern Lebanon, though he eventually accepted it following Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s decision. Generally, Sneh is considered a “hawk” in the Labor Party.^[4] He has repeatedly expressed concern over Iran’s Nuclear Program,^[5]^[6] In 2006, Iran filed a complaint to the UN Security Council over his remarks that Israel must be ready to prevent Iran’s nuclear program “at all costs.”^[7]

In the negotiations leading to the formation of the 31st Government under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, there was extensive speculation that Sneh would be appointed Deputy Minister of Defense. Although not initially appointed to a position in the government, Sneh was appointed Deputy Minister of Defense on 30 October 2006. He served under Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who also was the Labor Party leader. The replacement of Peretz by Barak as both party leader and Defense Minister in the summer of 2007 also led to a change in the deputy position; Sneh left office on 18 June 2007 and was replaced by Matan Vilnai.^[8]

On 25 May 2008 Sneh announced that he would be leaving the Labor Party and creating a new party, Yisrael Hazaka. He left the Knesset on 28 May and was replaced by Shakhiv Shana’an.^[9]

He lives in Herzliya, and is married with 2 children.

April 4, 2010
Iraq’s Kurds Lose Political Dominance In Kirkuk

Turkomans demonstrate in Kirkuk in 2006, demanding recognition of their ethnic group’s status in the disputed region.

March 19, 2010

By Charles Recknagel

Before the March 7 parliamentary elections in Iraq, there was no question of who dominated politics in mixed-population Kirkuk — it was the two main political factions in the neighboring Kurdish autonomous region.

But with the vote count from Kirkuk city and its surrounding Tamin Province about 80 percent complete, it is clear that the political landscape is dramatically changing.

The partial vote count shows the secular Al-Iraqiyah coalition and the Kurdistan Alliance in a virtual tie, with the balance between them shifting by only wafer-thin differences as the vote tally rises.

If the current balance holds, it means that the divided province’s Turkoman and Arab populations will have a much louder political voice than before. That in turn could complicate Kurdish hopes of one day incorporating oil-rich Kirkuk into their autonomous region.

Turkoman politicians in Kirkuk make no secret of the fact that they competed in the parliamentary contest precisely with that goal in mind.

United Against Kurdish Ambitions

Hicran Kazanci head of the foreign relations department of the Iraqi Turkoman Front, tells RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service that Turkoman candidates enlisted in a variety of coalitions for the March 7 race. But he says they all agree on one thing.

“Despite the fact the Turkomans went into the election with different coalitions, on major and essential subjects they are united,” Kazanci says. “For example, about the future status of Kirkuk, all of them are united in opposition toward annexing Kirkuk into any federation. And they are united in making Turkoman one of Iraq’s official languages.”

A map Iraq’s ethnic makeup

Turkoman and Arab politicians made up the vast bulk of Al-Iraqiyah’s candidates in the local race, coming for the first time under a single political umbrella in the divided province. That is in sharp contrast to much of Kirkuk’s recent history, where the three main population groups — Kurdish, Turkoman, and Arab — have all competed against each other.

In the years immediately following the United States’ toppling of Saddam Hussein, both Turkomans and Arabs boycotted attempts to form a provincial government. They expressed anger over what they said were Kurdish efforts to appropriate the province de facto after moving Kurdish peshmerga fighters into the area to support the U.S. invasion.

The Turkomans and Arabs only agreed to take part in the running of the province after a power-sharing deal in 2008. Under that deal, the provincial governor is a Kurd while his two deputies are an Arab and a Turkoman.

But Kirkuk’s provincial parliament is still disputed after Arabs and Turkomans largely stayed away from the first election in 2005, handing the Kurds a majority. The Iraqi government excluded Tamin Province from the January 2009 provincial elections due to fears of sparking sectarian unrest.

Given this background, the fact that this month’s elections for deputies to the national parliament went peacefully in Tamin Province is a major surprise. To ensure security, the Iraqi police fielded 56 mobile patrols in Kirkuk city on election day, while Kurdish peshmerga also spread out less obtrusively across the provincial capital.

Simira Balay, a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Radio Free Iraq, says the Kurdish coalition was caught unawares by the election results, after it “had expected to dominate the election, but it seems the Kurdish vote split among a number of Kurdish parties, including Goran.” She says Kurdish bloc “now is neck and neck with the Iraqiyah list, which got most of the Turkoman and Arab vote.”

The Kurdish coalition comprises the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Goran, a recently created Kurdish opposition party, scored well in recent elections by running on an anticorruption platform.

Resolving Kirkuk Issue

In the aftermath of the elections, Kurdish political leaders — like their Turkoman counterparts — are stressing unity in their position over Kirkuk.

The Kurds see the city as the natural and historic capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. And they insist upon holding a referendum in the province to determine its future status.

“The issue of Kirkuk is [already] in the Iraqi political arena to be solved in accordance with Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution,” says Rizgar Ali, the Kurdish head of Kirkuk’s provincial council.

Major steps under Article 140 include resolving property disputes created by Hussein’s policy of “Arabizing” Kirkuk, the holding of a census and conducting a referendum to decide the province’s future status.

To date, progress on all these steps has been painfully slow. Most property disputes remain unresolved and unrest in northern Iraq has prevented a census. The referendum, originally planned for no later than the end of 2007, has slipped accordingly.

That limbo is unacceptable to the Kurds, who are sure to use their full representation in the Baghdad parliament, including deputies from the Kurdish region, to continue to press for swift implementation of Article 140.

But it is likely that both the Turkomans and Arabs will use their new voice in the federal legislature to try to subject Article 140 to further negotiation.

According to Rakan Said, the Arab deputy governor of Kirkuk, the election results “laid the ground for dialogue.” He adds that now there are “two parties to the issue of Kirkuk: one is Al-Iraqiyah and the other is the Kurdish coalition. So the platform [for dialogue] has become clear and without interference.”

New Political Landscape

Al-Iraqiyah, headed by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, ran on a nonsectarian, nationalist platform. Its success on the national level as a joint front-runner with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition has appeared to realign Iraqi politics by relegating sectarian- and ethnic-based parties to the background.

With some 80 percent of the vote counted nationwide, the Shi’ite religious parties’ Iraqi National Alliance are in third place and the Kurdistan Alliance in fourth. Still, Iraqi parliamentary politics is all about making coalitions and in the past the Kurds have proved adept at playing the role of kingmakers.

Whether the Kurdish parties can continue to do so now, or are relegated to a less prominent role, will directly affect Kirkuk’s eventual status. The Kurds want it to be part of Iraqi Kurdistan. And the newly empowered Kirkuk Turkoman-Arab bloc is just as determined to play the spoiler.

Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomans all claim the province around Kirkuk based on a long historical presence in the area.

The Turkic-speaking Turkomans, who claim to be the second-largest group in northern Iraq after the Kurds, trace their presence to the time of the Seljuk Empire, when migrating Turkic tribes conquered a vast expanse of territory stretching from modern Iran to Turkey.

Muhammad Tahir of RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service contributed to this report

https://www.rferl.org/a/Iraqs_Kurds_Lose_Political_Dominance_In_Kirkuk/1988609.html

March 20, 2010
Ethnic Kurd wins high court release ruling after failed deportation
• Test case reveals Iraqi government resistance to repatriations
• Home Office officials out of control, claims rights group
- Owen Bowcott
Home Office attempts to forcibly deport thousands of failed Iraqi asylum seekers suffered a setback today when it emerged that Baghdad has objected to any “increase in returns”.

The official refusal surfaced in a high court test case , which ruled that an ethnic Kurd should be released after 21 months in immigration detention because there was no likelihood of his being sent back, even in the “medium term”.

The decision by Mr Justice Langstaff may relate only to a single individual – Soran Ahmed, 22, from Kirkuk – but the judgment has exposed the Iraqi government’s reluctance to receive deportees and the difficulty UK officials have persuading counterparts in Baghdad to cooperate.

An internal Whitehall document, read out to the court, detailed how the UK Border Agency is proposing to fly Iraqi officials into Britain so that they can understand and “buy-in” to the deportation process. It also suggested arranging a UK ministerial visit to Baghdad to stress “the importance of returns to Iraq“.

Ahmed, whose case was supported by the Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ) civil rights group, was one of 44 failed Iraqi asylum seekers forcibly put on an abortive charter flight to Baghdad last October with private security guards; Ahmed claimed he was assaulted on board.

In Baghdad, Iraqi interior officials never appeared and the deportees interviewed by an infuriated Iraqi colonel in charge of the airport. “He was antagonistic from the outset,” Mr Justice Langstaff commented.

The colonel accepted 10 deportees and ordered the rest back to London. They did not have the correct Iraqi documentation, he claimed, or were ethnic Kurds who would be in danger in the predominantly Arab city of Baghdad.

There are regular UK deportation flights to the relative peace of the Kurdistan Regional Government area in northern Iraq. Other European countries have been sending failed asylum seekers back to central and southern Iraq. The UK is meeting stiffer resistance to this route.

The United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) still opposes repatriations to the central five governorates of Iraq due to the risk of violence. An email from officials in Baghdad to Whitehall last May “disclosed a reluctance to see an increase in the return of Iraqi nationals from the UK to Iraq,” the judge said.

A Foreign Office official who flew to Iraq several times to prepare the way for the flight explained that he met resistance from Iraqi officials to EU documentation. On receipt of the full list of deportees the Iraqis said: “We will see what we can do”.

A report from the conference reviewing the failure of the October flight suggested that the UK Borders Agency should learn from more successful EU deportation programmes and the Iraqi prime minister’s office should be written to for help. The high court heard that the letter has still not been despatched.

It would be unlawful to continue to detain Ahmed, said Langstaff. He was previously imprisoned in Britain for sexual assault and using false documents. There was no prospect of UK flights returning him to Kirkuk via Baghdad this year and the Kurdish Regional Government would not accept him. The judge ordered him to be released under strict bail conditions despite the fact that he posed “some risk” to the public. Bail conditions will be determined at later hearing.

Caroline Slocock, chief executive of RMJ, welcomed the judgment. “”[The flight] should never have left the UK. Home Office staff widened their own criteria on who could safely be on board, largely to fill empty seats at the last moment.

“Not only was the destination of the flight kept secret from those being removed, but it is now clear Iraqi authorities were kept in the dark. The alarming picture emerging is of Home Office officials out of control. Officials needs to get a grip of the problem rather than egg officials on by changes of policy which make it easier for the remove people without proper judicial scrutiny.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/feb/19/kurd-asylum-seeker-repatriation-iraq, 19 February 2010
February 28, 2010
45-minute WMD claim ‘came from an Iraqi taxi driver’

Tory MP and defence specialist Adam Holloway says MI6 got information from a taxi driver who had heard Iraqi military commanders talking about weapons

An Iraqi taxi driver was the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained the information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi militarycommanders talking about Saddam’s weapons.

The 45-minute claim was a key feature of the dossier about Iraq‘s weapons of mass destruction that was released by Tony Blair in September 2002. Blair published the information to bolster public support for war.

After the war the dossier became hugely controversial when it became clear that some of the information it contained was not true. An inquiry headed by Lord Butler into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war revealed that MI6 had subsequently accepted that some of its Iraqi sources were unreliable, but his report did not identify who they were.

Today, in an interview with the Daily Mail, Holloway said the key piece of information about 45 minutes came from an Iraqi officer who was using a taxi driver as his own sub-source.

“[MI6] were running a senior Iraqi army officer who had a source of his own, a cab driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border,” said Holloway, a former Grenadier Guardsman and television journalist.

“He apparently overheard two Iraqi army officers two years before who had spoken about weapons with the range to hit targets elsewhere in the Middle East.”

Holloway made his comments to coincide with the publication of a report he has written claiming that MI6 always had reservations about some of the information in the dossier but that these reservations were brushed aside when Downing Street was preparing it for publication.

According to the Mail, Holloway says in his report: “Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, [MI6] were squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all.

“In the [MI6] analysts’ footnote to their report, it flagged up that part of the report describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. The missiles verifiably did not exist.

“The footnote said it in black and white. Despite this the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier.”

Holloway claims that MI6 was not to blame for the fact that the footnote was ignored. “It seems that someone, perhaps in Downing Street, found it rather inconvenient and ignored it lest it interfere with our reasons for going to war,” his report says.

The report is due to be published on the first defence website.

Butler concluded that, although the claims in the Iraq dossier went to the “outer limits” of what the intelligence available at the time would sustain, there was no evidence of “deliberate distortion”.

Today Sir John Scarlett, the key figure responsible for the preparation of the dossier, will give evidence to the Iraq inquiry. Scarlett was chairman of the joint intelligence committee at the time and he went on to become head of MI6.

He is expected to be asked about the dossier, although he is unlikely to provide detailed information about MI6 sources in public. The inquiry has said that, if witnesses want to discuss confidential issues relating to national security, they can do so in private.

The September dossier did not specify what weapons Iraq could deploy within 45 minutes. Intelligence officials subsequently revealed that it was meant to be a reference to battlefield weapons, not long-range missiles.

But, when it was published, some British papers interpreted the dossier as meaning that British troops based in Cyprus would be vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. At the time the government did not do anything to correct this error.

Guardian

December 8, 2009
Turkey: An Ally No More

by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
October 28, 2009

the Middle East Forum, headed by Daniel Pipes

The foreign ministers of Turkey and Syria met in Aleppo in October 2009.

“There is no doubt he is our friend,” Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, says of Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions point to the profound change of orientation by Turkey’s government, for six decades the West’s closest Muslim ally, since Erdoğan’s AK party came to power in 2002.

Three events this past month reveal the extent of that change. The first came on October 11 with the news that the Turkish military – a long-time bastion of secularism and advocate of cooperation with Israel – abruptly asked Israeli forces not to participate in the annual “Anatolian Eagle” air force exercise.

Erdoğan cited “diplomatic sensitivities” for the cancelation and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu spoke of “sensitivity on Gaza, East Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa mosque.” The Turks specifically rejected Israeli planes that may have attacked Hamas (an Islamist terrorist organization) during last winter’s Gaza Strip operation. While Damascus applauded the disinvitation, it prompted the U.S. and Italian governments to withdraw their forces from Anatolian Eagle, which in turn meant canceling the international exercise.

As for the Israelis, this “sudden and unexpected” shift shook to the core their military alignment with Turkey, in place since 1996. Former air force chief Eytan Ben-Eliyahu, for example, called the cancelation “a seriously worrying development.” Jerusalem immediately responded by reviewing Israel’s practice of supplying Turkey with advanced weapons, such as the recent $140 million sale to the Turkish Air Force of targeting pods. The idea also arose to stop helping the Turks defeat the Armenian genocide resolutions that regularly appear before the U.S. Congress.

Ministers of the Turkish and Syrian governments met at the border town of Öncüpınar and symbolically lifted a bar dividing their two countries on October 13.

Barry Rubin of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya not only argues that “The Israel-Turkey alliance is over” but concludes that Turkey’s armed forces no longer guard the secular republic and can no longer intervene when the government becomes too Islamist.

The second event took place two days later, on October 13, when Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem announced that Turkish and Syrian forces had just “carried out maneuvers near Ankara.” Moallem rightly called this an important development “because it refutes reports of poor relations between the military and political institutions in Turkey over strategic relations with Syria.” Translation: Turkey’s armed forces lost out to its politicians.

Thirdly, ten Turkish ministers, led by Davutoğlu, joined their Syrian counterparts on October 13 for talks under the auspices of the just-established “Turkey-Syria High Level Strategic Cooperation Council.” The ministers announced having signed almost 40 agreements to be implemented within 10 days; that “a more comprehensive, a bigger” joint land military exercise would be held than the first one in April; and that the two countries’ leaders would sign a strategic agreement in November.

The cover of Ahmet Davutoğlu’s book, “Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position.”

The council’s concluding joint statement announced the formation of “a long-term strategic partnership” between the two sides “to bolster and expand their cooperation in a wide spectrum of issues of mutual benefit and interest and strengthen the cultural bonds and solidarity among their peoples.” The council’s spirit, Davutoğlu explained, “is common destiny, history and future; we will build the future together,” while Moallem called the get-together a “festival to celebrate” the two peoples.

Bilateral relations have indeed been dramatically reversed from a decade earlier, when Ankara came perilously close to war with Syria. But improved ties with Damascus are only one part of a much larger effort by Ankara to enhance relations with regional and Muslim states, a strategy enunciated by Davutoğlu in his influential 2000 book, Stratejik derinlik: Türkiye’nin uluslararası konumu (“Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position”).

In brief, Davutoğlu envisions reduced conflict with neighbors and Turkey emerging as a regional power, a sort-of modernized Ottoman Empire. Implicit in this strategy is a distancing of Turkey from the West in general and Israel in particular. Although not presented in Islamist terms, “strategic depth” closely fits the AK party’s Islamist world view.

As Barry Rubin notes, “the Turkish government is closer politically to Iran and Syria than to the United States and Israel.” Caroline Glick, a Jerusalem Post columnist, goes further: Ankara already “left the Western alliance and became a full member of the Iranian axis.” But official circles in the West seem nearly oblivious to this momentous change in Turkey’s allegiance or its implications.

The cost of their error will soon become evident.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

October 29, 2009