Turkish Troops Build Up On Border

Witnesses said busloads of troops headed toward the area from the regional centre of Diyarbakir and warplanes patrolled the skies.

A driver at Silopi's former haj camp for Muslim pilgrims, now used as a military staging area, said he had seen hundreds of troops heading toward the border, just 30 minutes away.

Tanks and artillery earlier moved along the road before turning parallel to the border and heading into the mountains near the Turkish town of Uludere, the driver said.

I have not seen tanks but soldiers have been carried out in buses all day, and I heard the sounds of patrolling jets overhead, a resident of Diyarbakir, capital of southeastern Turkey, told Reuters.

 

Witnesses also saw Turkish F-16 fighters take off from an airbase in Diyarbakir. Military officials would not say where they were headed.

Ciller denied the movements were in preparation for a cross-border operation similar to a six-week military incursion against guerrillas of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) launched in March 1995. What is on the agenda is not an operation. What is on the agenda is not to allow such (rebel) infiltrations, Ciller told reporters as she left the foreign ministry. She did not elaborate.

At the weekend, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sent troops into Arbil, the main Kurdish city in northern Iraq, to support one of the two main Iraqi Kurdish factions. The US responded with missile attacks on southern Iraq on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Turkey says the PKK has increased its activity on the border following the fighting in northern Iraq involving the other two Kurdish groups.

However, there was no indication Turkish forces had crossed the border, an increasingly frequent tactic in Turkey's 12-year-old battle with the PKK.

Reporters in the region said there had been sporadic fighting over the past few days in Turkey's Cukurca district, directly across the border from a PKK camp.

There is the possibility of a sudden air-backed assault into northern Iraq. We are thinking of hitting the enemy (PKK) all of a sudden without giving it the chance of protection, a senior military official, who declined to be identified, said by telephone before Ciller spoke.

We know that two-thirds of PKK power and its training centres are established in northern Iraq, he said.

Officials said on Wednesday Turkey was preparing to set up a security cordon inside northern Iraq to halt PKK infiltration. A foreign ministry official said the zone would be five to 10 km deep.

The PKK's leader called his supporters to war against Turkey.

The fascist Turkish colonialists have decided to invade southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq). They could invade at any moment, Abdullah Ocalan told a pro-Kurdish news agency based in Germany. All our freedom fighters must be on the highest state of alert for the sacred war.