Turkey will not pull its troops out of northern Iraq, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday.
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And police officer was killed by snipers in Turkey’s restive Kurdish-dominated southeast on Wednesday, local security sources said.
The Turkish battalion located outside the city of Mosul arrived at the invitation of the former governor of Mosul in order to train volunteers from the city to defend it after the Iraqi government’s forces fled and terrorists penetrated deeply into the rural areas of that province.
Earlier this week, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi urged North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to force Turkey to immediately withdraw its troops from Iraq.
Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani visited Turkey on Wednesday as Ankara was embroiled in a crisis with Baghdad over the deployment of troops near an Islamic State group-held area in northern Iraq.
Iraq’s foreign ministry said Turkish forces had entered Iraqi territory without the knowledge of Baghdad, who view their presence as a “hostile act”.
“It itself was the first to violate worldwide norms by invading Iraq without United Nations sanctions, as well as bombing Libya and meddling in Syria’s internal affairs”, he said.
Hadi al-Amiri, the head of the Badr Organization, one of Iraq’s most powerful Iranian-backed Shiite militias, went a step further, saying any US base in Iraq would be considered a “target”.
He expressed disappointment that the council did not agree on Russia’s proposal to issue a statement reaffirming the need to respect worldwide law and sovereignty and calling for unity against Islamic State extremists.
“We’re solving it between Baghdad and Ankara bilaterally”, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, Iraqi ambassador, said after Russian Federation raised the issue of Turkey’s deployment during a closed-door meeting of the Security Council.
“We just encourage both sides to resolve their differences here, whatever disagreements there may be”, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said at a news briefing on Tuesday.
In truth, a few hundred Turkish trainers have been present in Iraq for months, working to train Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Sunni militiamen.
“Our idea was to call the attention of the members of the Security Council to the situation”, he said.
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Though officially the expansion was related to concerns about threats from ISIS, they also cited “declarations encouraging violence” against Turkish companies among Iraqi Shi’ite groups in recent weeks.
