Gathering Forces With Turkey

• Share

Turkey has hesitated at requests to let the U.S. base ground forces on its soil, but its own military is already in the game. A senior U.S. official told TIME that Turkish officers are working closely with U.S. special forces now deployed in Kurdish-held areas of northern Iraq, and the arrangement is working for both sides. The U.S. learns the lay of the land from those familiar with it, while Turkey gets firsthand knowledge of the movements of potential Kurdish adversaries, as well as some goodwill from Washington.

Turkish troops have good reason for wanting to know what the Kurds are up to. A separatist guerrilla group is based in craggy mountains along the Turkey-Iraq border. To contain them, Turkey is planning ahead in other ways, a senior Turkish official said: its military has won U.S. approval to establish 17 refugee camps--10 of them on Iraqi soil — as soon as war starts. Ankara wants to avoid a repeat of 1991, when a flood of 450,000 Kurdish refugees into Turkey was joined by armed insurgents who went on to reignite a civil war. Turkish-controlled camps within Iraq would help prevent that from happening. In the meantime, the Turks have stepped up their military presence in the eastern part of the country and within Iraq itself, with as many as 20,000 troops at a time operating in a region patrolled by U.S. and British warplanes, the Turkish official told TIME. "We've learned our lesson," he said.