The Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, said the troop rotation was routine and that Turkish forces had set up a camp near Mosul nearly a year ago in coordination with Iraqi authorities.
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Iraq’s foreign ministry has summoned the Turkish ambassador to Baghdad to protest at the deployment of Turkish forces near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and demand their immediate withdrawal.
The deployment “is considered a serious violation of Iraqi sovereignty”, it added.
The Islamic State group took control of Mosul in June 2014, and the city has since become a key center of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
However, the US military officials said that several hundred Turkish troops had moved into Iraq and appeared to be there for a training mission.
Turkey has also conducted dozens of air raids in recent months against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Turkish-Kurdish rebel group which has bases in Iraq.
The compound near Mosul is in the area claimed by both the Iraqi Kurds and the central government in Baghdad.
Video released on the website of Turkey’s pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper showed flatbed trucks carrying armored vehicles along a road at night, describing them as a convoy accompanying the Turkish troops to Bashiqa.
Turkey says it deployed 150 soldiers in the town of Bashiqa year to train Iraqi Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State (IS) group.
A small number of Turkish trainers was already at the camp to train the Hashid Watani (national mobilisation), a force made up of mainly Sunni Arab former Iraqi police and volunteers from Mosul.
The founder of the camp, former Ninevah governor Atheel al Nujaifi, said the Turkish trainers were called in by Iraq’s Prime Minister and defence minister.
Turkey committed a “hostile act” by deploying troops to northern Iraq, according to the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad. Russia announced Friday that it will suspend visa-free travel with Turkey amid the escalating spat over the downing of a Russian warplane by a Turkish fighter jet at the Syrian border. A battalion of soldiers has gone there. “This is a part of that training”, one senior Turkish official said.
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Turkey’s move lends more credence to the notion that its main Iraqi partner in the fight against ISIS isn’t the Iraqi government, but the semi-autonomous Kurdish regions in the country’s north, which have a history of supplying Turkey with much-needed energy. The officials said that the Turkish force wasn’t related to the broader U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State.
