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| Middle East |
| Turks moving up to start positions |
| 2003-01-31 |
| Too long and too much speculation in this one, so here's the meat: The Turkish army has announced that it is sending additional military weapons and equipment to its south-eastern border with Iraq. "The level of readiness of our units should be raised... for possible developments on the issue of regional security," the army general staff statement said. "To this end, equipment and material reinforcements will be dispatched to the 2nd Army Command as of today [Wednesday]." Possible developments should occur real soon now. The 2nd Army is based in the south-eastern city of Malatya and is responsible for maintaining order along Turkey's 330-kilometre (200-mile) border with Iraq. They're going to be busy. The Turkish newspaper Zaman published a front-page picture on Thursday of trucks crossing the Turkey-Iraq border at Harbur. It said its photographer had counted 110 trucks on Tuesday. That sounds modest, actually, except that the trucks will return on Wednesday and make another trip Thursday. ... a retired general told the UK's Guardian newspaper that Turkish troops would send troops into Iraq whether or not Turkey joins the invasion, to "protect refugees and prevent the Kurds getting their hands on Mosul and Kirkuk [oilfields]". A few hundred truckloads of men and material would be a good start on this. Several thousand Turkish troops have been stationed in northern Iraq since 1996, but Kurdish groups have warned that any new Turkish forces entering northern Iraq without the specific goal of ousting Saddam Hussein will meet with armed resistance. This is what we don't want, fighting between the Turks and the Kurds. The Kurds on the Turkish side might then rise up. That would be a major distraction for us and might keep us from using Turkey at all. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #2 The above post was supposed to go under the Pravda article. My screw up. Sorry for any confusion. |
| Posted by: Rifle308 2003-01-31 12:15:46 |
| #1 Okay, some of this is a bit out there, as for 'ethnic troops' I doubt there are many of them even if they exist. It is just as likely sightings of Brits who have grown breads and are well tanned after being in that area so long. The AWACS is a flying radar, to carry jamming gear would require a lot of modification and would interfere with its main job of surveilance. We only have so many of these. Any jammimng work would be done by specialized aircraft of which we do have. It is no surprize we have SF among the Kurds aready, the war will come in the next couple of weeks, but some of our forces are still onroute. My concern is that we do not have enough ground troops to keep some order in Iraq. Things are heating up in Afganistan while in Iraq the US will have a big job keeping the lid on any extreme elements of the Kurds and south Shiite so as to keep Iraq a single state and not give Turkey problems. I worry that even with a 'big' scale victory we will face low level insurgency problems from Afganistan to Iraq and many other places. The local gov'ts will not necessarily have the ability to deal with these. We are still short of 'leg'infantry and the readiness problems of the Army left over from Clinton have not all been fixed. This may account for a perhaps over reliance on the small number of SF troops. Meanwhile, across a continent N. Korea seems to be readying production of more nukes and even closer Pakistan-India are growling at each other again. Plus the Red Chinese are probably watching the US activities as they ponder their plans for the South China Sea area, Far East Russia, and SE Asia in general. The old Chinese Curse is upon us I fear:"May you live in interesting times". |
| Posted by: Rifle308 2003-01-31 09:44:34 |