Mercury rising: Turkey's Iran dilemma

[Dover]

Viewpoint: Mercury rising: Turkey's Iran dilemma
Iason Athanasiadis

May 23, 2006

-- Highly-factionalized revolutionary states like Iran have a tendency to trip over their own rhetoric. Tehran has been protesting for some time that it is a pacifist state seeking to bring stability to a troubled region. Until President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his infamous statements about Israel last November, Iran at least had a chance of convincing a suspicious international community of its case.

Then, last month, Iranian field guns in the sensitive, ethnically-mixed Kurdistan province bordering northern Iraq opened fire for the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein in a salvo targeting Kurdish militant positions in the neighboring country. It marked an unprecedented escalation in the tension between the autonomous Kurdish-majority region in Iraq and its Turkish and Persian neighbors.

Kurdish rebels fighting the Iranian government have been especially active recently in mounting attacks against Iranian army posts inside the Kurdish-majority, western Iranian Kurdistan. Hundreds of Iranian soldiers and policemen have been killed in these offensives during a spike in violence beginning in 2003.

Aside from weakening Iran's pacifist protestations, the Iranian artillery strikes took the fledgling, anti-Kurdish Turkish-Iranian alliance a step further in an already critically polarized region. The attacks came as Turkey continues an intimidating troop buildup along its common borders with Iraq, in what has become an annual event in Ankara's long-standing fight against Iraq-based Kurdish guerrillas. ...cont'd

http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060523-025602-8697r