Kurdish rebels free Turkish soldiers
ANKARA (AFP) — Eight Turkish soldiers captured by Kurdish rebels and held in Iraq were freed and returned to Turkey on Sunday after Ankara threatened to launch a cross-border attack on the militants' Iraqi sanctuaries.
The rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is fighting for a separate state in southeastern Turkey, handed the soldiers to Iraq's northern Kurdish regional government in the early morning, officials said.
"After personal attempts by Kurdistan regional president Massud Barzani, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Kurdistan regional prime minister Nechirvan Barzani, the Turkish soldiers who were detained by the PKK were released this morning," the Kurdistan Regional Government said in a statement.
"The soldiers were in good health," said a Kurdish official in northern Iraq, adding that they were initially passed to US troops in the region before being delivered to Turkish forces.
They were then flown in a Turkish military plane from northern Iraq to the southeastern Turkish town of Diyarbakir, where military chiefs said they had been "reintegrated" into the army.
The release came as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was due in Washington to press Ankara's demands for action against PKK sanctuaries in the autonomous Kurdish north of Iraq.
Turkey has massed an estimated 100,000 troops along the Iraq border and threatened a large-scale incursion against PKK bases in Iraq since the soldiers were captured in an October 21 ambush in which 12 other troops were killed.
Turkish officials said the government's determination to fight the rebels had not been diminished by the release of the prisoners.
"We will continue to fight the battle which we have fought from the start with total determination... on the military, political, diplomatic and economic fronts against the scourge of terrorism," Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek told the Anatolia news agency.
Ankara has stepped up anti-PKK operations on the Turkish side of the border and says it has killed more than 80 rebels in the aftermath of the October 21 attack.
Two more rebels and a Kurdish paramilitary working with the Turkish army were killed Sunday in a firefight near the Syrian border in southeastern Turkey, Anatolia reported.
The Turkish government warned Saturday it retained the option of a military strike inside northern Iraq to attack PKK rebels who have been fighting since 1984 for self-rule in southeastern Turkey.
To further step up the pressure on Washington, which has urged Ankara to hold back on a military strike, Erdogan left on Saturday to meet US President George W. Bush.
"Our visit comes at a time when (Turkish-US) relations are undergoing a serious test," Erdogan told reporters at Istanbul airport, adding that he hoped his Monday meeting with Bush would produce "concrete measures" to counter the PKK in Iraq.
Sean McCormack, a US State Department spokesman travelling with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the Middle East, applauded the Iraqi government's efforts to secure the release of the hostages.
He urged cooperation between Iraq and Turkey in fighting the Kurdish guerrillas, calling them "a common enemy of Turkey, Iraq and the United States."
Turkey accuses the Iraqi Kurdish leadership of harbouring and aiding the separatist PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and by much of the international community.
Wary of fresh turmoil in Iraq, Washington opposes Turkish unilateral action in a relatively peaceful part of the war-ravaged country.
Iraqi officials said Saturday they were setting up new checkpoints in the north to try to restrict the rebels' movement and cut their supplies.
The Iraqi Kurdish authorities also started closing offices of a PKK-linked political party, but Ankara wants Iraq to urgently close PKK base camps in its northern mountains and arrest the group's leaders.
Meanwhile in Germany, thousands of Turks and Kurds on Sunday took to the streets of Berlin and Cologne to peacefully protest mounting tensions between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatists, German police said.
Clashes between Kurds and nationalist Turks in the German capital last Sunday left 18 policemen injured.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned at the weekend that Germany "will not tolerate violence" between Turks and Kurds on its soil.
