Iraqi Kurdish leader in Turkey after Baghdad row over troops

ANKARA, Turkey – Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani visited Turkey on Wednesday, December 9, as Ankara was embroiled in a crisis with Baghdad over the deployment of troops near an Islamic State group-held area in northern Iraq.

After arriving in Ankara, Barzani made an unannounced visit to Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) and was to hold talks with spy chief Hakan Fidan, local media reported.

He will also meet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Barzani has long-standing ties with Ankara, and there are multiple Turkish military sites in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, of which he is the president.

Turkey has deployed up to 300 soldiers backed by 20 tanks to a base in the Bashiqa area near Mosul, the Islamic State group’s main hub in Iraq, describing it as a routine rotation to train local Iraqi forces to retake the city from the jihadists.

But the Iraqi federal government has told Turkey to pull the forces out, saying they had entered the country illegally without its consent.

Baghdad on Sunday gave Turkey a 48-hour deadline and threatened to appeal to the UN Security Council unless the troops were withdrawn.

Turkey then said it had halted further deployment to the Bashiqa area but said there would be no pull-out.

“Our presence (near) Mosul will continue as part of the training programme,” Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin told reporters in Ankara.

Kalin said the issue could be resolved through dialogue with Iraq.

“The main issue is to support Iraqis in their fight against Daesh,” he said using an Arabic acronym for ISIS.

“It has nothing to do with violation of a country’s sovereignty rights.”

Authorities say the Turkish army has trained local Iraqis in the Bashiqa area since March 2015, indicating that troops there are not assigned with any combat mission.

Writing on Twitter this week, Brett McGurk, the special US envoy for the anti-IS coalition, said Washington does not support military deployments inside Iraq “absent the consent of the Iraqi government.”

“This includes deployment of US military personnel, as well as military personnel from any other country,” he wrote. – Rappler.com