By Xinhua
Baghdad : The Iraqi government on Tuesday condemned the Turkish incursion in Iraq’s Kurdistan region and demanded an immediate withdrawal for the Turkish troops from northern Iraq.
“The Iraqi cabinet expressed its rejection and condemnation for the Turkish army incursion,” Ali al-Dabbagh the government spokesman said in a televised statement.
Dabbagh said that the cabinet considered the Turkish military action as a “violation to the Iraqi sovereignty” and called on Turkey to withdraw its troops immediately.
The cabinet also warned Turkey that “unilateral military action is not acceptable and threatens the friendly relations between the two countries.”
On Friday, Turkey said that 10,000 of its troops were taking part in the cross-border offensive, which follows periodic air raids on suspected hideouts of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters in northern Iraq.
A day after that, while expressing his government’s understanding to the incursion, Dabbagh said “we know the threat that Turkey is facing by the terrorist PKK organization, but military operations will not solve the problem.”
“Turkey should adopt another type of solution,” Dabbagh told a press conference on Saturday through a translator.
The PKK, listed by the United States and Turkey as a terrorist group, took up arms against Turkey in 1984 with the aim of creating an ethnic homeland in the southeast of the country. More than 30,000 people have been killed in the over-two-decade conflict.
The Turkish military was authorized by its parliament last November to enter into northern Iraq to pursue PKK members.
But such a move has been rare as the United States – Turkey’s major ally – is worried that a major incursion would destabilize the Kurdish region, which has been spared of the violence in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.