Turks pitch in: new troops to Iraq

If the Pentagon hopes Turkey's decision will break a logjam of foreign resistance in putting troops Iraq, it is likely to be disappointed, Mr. Barkey and other experts say.

"This won't lead to any chain reaction," says Patrick Lang, a former Middle East intelligence analyst with the US military. "No one in the Arab world is going to do something because Turkey did, and others have their own reasons for not jumping in."

Some reports suggest the Pentagon has already negotiated with the Turks to eventually deploy troops to an area north of Baghdad, called the Sunni Triangle, where US troops have come under regular attack. The thinking behind such a deployment is that the Turks, as Sunni Muslims, could work well there.

But others with long experience in Iraq see a disaster in such a deployment. "I don't see how you could possibly send Turkish troops to the Sunni Triangle," says Mr. Lang. "The level of animosity toward them would be even more intense. You have to remember that when a Turk kicks a stray dog, he calls it an Arab."

The Turkish government is essentially out to make amends with the US government. But since the war the US has also sweetened the pie it is holding under Turkey's nose.

Last month the US agreed to make loans of up to $8.5 billion available to an economically struggling Turkey. Even though the US says the loans and the sending of troops to Iraq are not directly linked, it does say the loans are contingent upon "cooperation" on Iraq. In addition, both the Pentagon and the State Department have agreed that in exchange for cooperation on Iraq, the US will help crack down on the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has fought a war with the government and still seeks Kurdish autonomy.

Beyond that, however, Turkey, as Iraq's northern neighbor, has other regional interests in seeing a particular outcome in Iraq. For example, Turkey would not want to see a strong Iraq emerge from reconstruction, experts say, and so would hope to influence its political development by its presence.

Recognition of that is also uppermost in the minds of many Iraqis, when they say they oppose the presence of any of Iraq's neighbors. The US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council Tuesday drafted a resolution opposing the introduction of Turkish troops to help the US-led peacekeeping mission in Iraqi, but delayed issuing the document, council members said.

"There's 100 percent agreement within the Council that no troops from any of our neighbors should come to Iraq," says Noshirwan Mustaf, an assistant to Jilal Talibani, a member of the council representing the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. "All of our neighbors, whether Turkey, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, have interests here, and we worry that they could make the situation less stable."

In addition to Turkey, the US has been lobbying a group of other countries hard - including such Muslim countries as Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, as well as Korea - to send substantial numbers of troops to Iraq.

But the US has made little headway with most of those countries, which have mostly shied away from deployment for domestic political reasons. And with prospects dimming somewhat for a once sure-fire UN resolution authorizing the dispatch of foreign troops, the international political cover many countries sought is also not materializing.

• Scott Baldauf in New Delhi, Dan Murhpy in Baghdad, and Yigal Schleifer in Istanbul contributed to this report.

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