About 200 protesters demanded international intervention to drive Turkey out of northern Iraq, yesterday in Kirkuk.
(MARWAN IBRAHIM/AFP/Getty Images)
IRBIL, Iraq - Lawmakers in northern Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region authorized their military yesterday to intervene if Turkish forces pursuing anti-government rebels bring their battle into civilian areas.
The move heightened fears that the conflict could draw in Iraqi Kurdish forces and destabilize the one region of Iraq that has been relatively peaceful since the US invasion in March 2003.
Tensions also were growing between the Iraqi government in Baghdad and Turkey, which sent thousands of ground troops over the northern border into Iraqi Kurdistan last week.
Turkey says its aim is to pursue separatists from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, who took up arms against the Turkish government in 1984 demanding Kurdish independence in southern Turkey and have bases in the mountains of northern Iraq.
But Iraq's Kurdish minority views the invasion as an infringement of Iraq's sovereignty.
Iraq's national government agrees. Its spokesman, Ali Ali al-Dabbagh, said yesterday that the Turkish action is not acceptable and is a threat to relations.
Also yesterday, Iraqi television showed a man identifying himself as one of five Britons abducted from an Iraqi government building in May. The man said his name is Peter and that his kidnappers are demanding the release of nine Iraqis held by British forces in Iraq.
It was the second time the previously unknown group claiming to hold the five men, the Shi'ite Islamic Resistance of Iraq, had released a video showing one of them.
In northern Iraq, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a bus outside the city of Mosul, where US and Iraqi forces say insurgents loyal to Al Qaeda in Iraq have regrouped after being driven from areas farther south.
Iraqi security officials said 14 people died, but the US military put the death toll at eight, not including the bomber.
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