Turkish army incursion into Kurdistan

According to my sources, the Turkish military has performed an incursion in force into northern Kurdistan with units backed by armored vehicles and combat aircraft. The official line from the Turkish military is that there's been no incursion in force but that units of the Turkish military may have crossed the border in `hot pursuit' of PKK rebels.

For their part, the Kurds are going along with this, for now.

"Up to this moment, there is no incursion by Turkish troops into the Iraq Kurdistan region," Fouad Hussein, the head of the office of Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani, was quoted as saying by al-Reuters.

"But I don't know if the troops have entered into distant parts of the mountains, situated between Iraq and Turkey."

I think that the Turks have indeed made a limited incursion into Kurdish territory, both as a sop to domestic political opinion (new elections are due in July), the Turkish Army and to `test the waters' and see what the Kurdish and American reaction would be.

As I reported previously the Turks have a huge military buildup on the border with Kurdistan and the US has pulled out of Kurdistan in the face of a threatened Turkish invasion....except for the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, only about a hundred miles form the Tukish/Kurdish border.

It may also be that, since the US military has maintained its positions in Kirkuk while withdrawing from the rest of Kurdistan, the Turks may have decided that an invasion of Kurdistan without that rich prize may not be worth it.

Stay tuned...

UPDATE: It appears that Turkish officials now have admitted that `several thousand' of their troops have entered Iraq . That's a somewhat different story thasn the denial we were getting earlier...

How deep or sustained the `incursion' is remains to be seen. And from the photo above, it doesn't look like a mere `hot pursuit into the remote mountains', now does it?