Turkey:The threat of an imminent invasion of northern Iraq by the Turkish army receded yesterday as Ankara's foreign minister vowed to put diplomacy before war, and Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, predicted that the PKK guerillas holed up in the mountains on the border with Turkey were about to announce a new ceasefire.
The signs that a peaceful solution to the crisis may be found came a day after an attack by Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey killed at least 12 Turkish soldiers and left eight missing, enraging public opinion in the country and piling pressure on the prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to order a military incursion.
The Turkish army yesterday intensified its operations in the southeast, close to the Iraqi border. It confirmed that eight soldiers were missing after the previous night's clashes. The PKK said it was holding eight "prisoners of war", but did not say whether they were on Turkish or Iraqi soil. "The men are being treated well and we will not harm them," a spokesman said.
After a late-night intervention on Sunday by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, who appealed for a few days of calm, Turkish officials yesterday pulled back from the threat of an immediate cross-border operation. The foreign minister Ali Babacan said during a visit to Kuwait that a military option would be the last resort.
"We will continue these diplomatic efforts with all good intentions to solve this problem caused by a terrorist organisation," he said on a tour of Arab countries to explain Turkey's position.
But he added: "If we do not reach any results, there are other means we might have to use."
Mr Babacan is due in Baghdad today for talks with Iraqi and US officials. In Washington, the state department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said the US was deploying "a diplomatic full-court press [ a term taken from basketball] to prevent a Turkish invasion in the north.
"We want to see an outcome where you have the Turks and the Iraqis working together, and we will do what we can to resolve the issue without a Turkish cross-border incursion," he said.
Turkey is demanding that the PKK camps in northern Iraq be closed down, and that the group's leaders be arrested and extradited.
In their telephone conversation on Sunday night, Mr Erdogan told Dr Rice that he expected the US to take "speedy steps" to end the PKK's activities in northern Iraq.
Ankara says the group - which has waged war with Ankara for almost 25 years - uses mountain hideouts there as bases from which to launch raids on Turkey. PKK leaders deny staging cross-border raids, pointing out that they have twice as many guerillas in Turkey as they do in Iraq.
The presence of the PKK along Iraq's rugged border with Turkey is a growing headache for Iraq's Kurdish leadership, who suspect the Turkish military of using the PKK issue as a pretext to disrupt their self-rule region. There is little love lost between the PKK and Massoud Barzani, the regional president, or Jalal Talabani, Iraq's president.
But the two men have offered to help broker a solution. On Sunday, they demanded that PKK fighters lay down their weapons and pursue their goals through purely political means, or leave Iraq.
- (Guardian service)