Turkey said to have sent troops across Iraq border

Published on 07/06/2007 01:22

SEVERAL thousand Turkish troops were last night said to have crossed the border into Iraq to chase Kurdish guerrillas operating from bases there.

Turkey's foreign minister and Iraqi officials denied any Turkish soldiers had entered Iraq, but two senior security officials, speaking anonymously, said a raid had been made early yesterday.

They said the operation was limited in scope and that it did not constitute the kind of large incursion that Turkish leaders have been discussing in recent weeks.

"It is not a major offensive and the number of troops is not in the tens of thousands," one of the officials said.

The official is based in south-east Turkey, where the military has been battling separatist Kurdish rebels since they took up arms in 1984. The US military said it was "very concerned".

The last major Turkish incursion into northern Iraq was in 1997, when about 50,000 troops were sent to the region.

Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, insisted the reports of a cross-border operation were false. "There is no such thing, no entry to another country. If such a thing happens, then we would announce it," he said. "We are in a war with terror; we will do whatever is necessary to fight terrorism."

Turkey has been building up its military forces on the Iraqi border recently, amid debate among political and military leaders about whether to attack separatist rebels of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers' Party.

A US military spokesman in Baghdad said: "We can't confirm a thing at this time, but we are looking into it and obviously we are very concerned."

Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said: "We are aware of this Turkish troops' build-up on the border, and the Iraqi government position has been that we will not accept or tolerate any military incursion into Iraqi territories."