IRAQ:Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, yesterday ordered the closure of the operation of the PKK Kurdish separatist group in his country in an attempt to prevent a Turkish military incursion across the border.
The move comes after intense international pressure to crack down on the PKK - which Ankara blames for the deaths of almost 50 civilians and soldiers inside Turkey in the past month - and avoid destabilisation of Iraq's only peaceful region that a Turkish military invasion would cause.
"The Kurdistan Workers' Party is a bad terrorist organisation and we have decided to close its offices and not allow it to work on Iraqi territory," Mr Maliki was quoted as saying. "We will do everything to curtail all terrorist activities that threaten Iraq as well as Turkey." His statement followed a visit to Baghdad yesterday by Ali Babacan, the Turkish foreign minister, who secured a promise that Iraq would act against the PKK.
At a meeting in Washington yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, and David Miliband, British foreign secretary, added their voices to the international chorus calling for Iraq to crack down on the PKK and for Ankara to show restraint.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister, earlier said Ankara was prepared to give diplomacy more time to achieve a resolution but warned that Turkey's patience was running out and that the government was ready to use swift military action "at any time".
Mr Erdogan, who met British prime minister Gordon Brown in London yesterday, has been under increasing pressure at home to authorise military action across the border. In an attempt to calm a volatile public mood, his government yesterday sought to restrict reporting of the aftermath of the deaths on Sunday of 12 soldiers in a PKK ambush - the incident that triggered the latest crisis. It instructed broadcasters to tone down their often emotional coverage of the soldiers' funerals.
Newspapers and television have given blanket coverage in the past few days to the deaths of the 12, most of whom were young conscripts. Footage of weeping mothers and families has been shown extensively, and is feeding an unpredictable public mood that veers between defiance of the PKK and a desire for vengeance.
Some newspaper columnists are also beginning to question the military's account of Sunday's incident. Serda Akinan, a columnist for the daily Aksam, asked yesterday why there was no intelligence warning of the attack and how a small group of PKK fighters could evade the estimated 60,000 Turkish troops massed near the Iraqi border.
Others have questioned why the general staff waited 36 hours to announce that eight soldiers were "missing" - presumed to have been taken hostage by the PKK. This was the context behind yesterday's request by the government, through the radio and television watchdog, asking broadcasters not to show footage that it said "hurts the psychology of society and public order and creates an image of the security forces as weak".