When does the killing stop for these people? When will oil become unimportant? It's ONLY oil.
Turkey expects the United States to take urgent action against Kurdish rebels hiding in northern Iraq, its prime minister said, in comments suggesting Ankara hopes to avoid a Turkish military operation in the region.
Turkey's parliament this week authorised troops to cross the mountainous border into northern Iraq to track down rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who use the region as a base from which to attack Turkish targets.
"We expect the coalition forces in Iraq, above all the Americans, to take steps in the current situation," Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told Turkish television late on Friday.
"These steps must be taken to ensure we get good results in the fight against the terrorist organisation in northern Iraq."
"We expect things from the United States rather than from Iraq," he said. The Baghdad government has little clout in the mainly Kurdish autonomous region of the north....
What's Next for Kurdistan? (click here)
A question every American politician needs to address.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, June 4, 2007, at 11:19 AM ET
A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter
I chanced last week to run into a senior staff member of UNAMI, which is the little-known (and somehow not very reassuring) acronym for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. You could read acres of news from that country as it undergoes everything that the death squads of the parties of God can inflict on a society, without ever being reminded that coalition forces are applying a U.N. mandate for the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq. The assaults by the Baathists and the Bin Ladenists on the U.N. presence have been especially vicious: The U.N. headquarters in Baghdad were utterly demolished by military-grade explosives three years ago, murdering among others the heroic Sergio Vieira de Mello, a senior U.N. peacemaker who was explicitly targeted by the Islamists for his role in overseeing the independence of "Christian" East Timor from "Muslim" Indonesia....
