Archive for the ‘Mosul’ Category
Turkish FM meets Iraq’s Turkmen leaders
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Saturday met with leaders of Iraq’s Turkmen population from Tal Afar who launched a peace initiative to end a long-standing feud between the city’s Shiite and Sunni Turkmen groups.
“The entire Iraq is precious to us. The fate of the Iraqis is the fate of Turkey. We will not let any Iraqi citizen down. The people of Tal Afar should live without knowing who is Shiite and who is Sunni,” Davutoglu said.
The Turkish foreign minister said Turkey would use all resources to open a university in Tal Afar, adding that Turkey’s development agency would also exert efforts to construct new houses for those Turkmen returning to Tal Afar. Read the rest of this entry »
Iraq’s Allawi rejects partial vote recount only in Baghdad
Ayad Allawi, whose joint Shiite-Sunni bloc won the largest number of parliamentary seats in Iraq’s general election in late March, said Monday he would not accept a partial vote recount only in Baghdad because this process could be open to fraud.
“A recount only in Baghdad is unacceptable,” Allawi told Hürriyet Daily News & Review in an interview during a brief visit to Ankara for talks with top Turkish officials. “We need to know where (vote) boxes are… We won’t accept fraud.”
He said election results were also disputed in many other Iraqi provinces, including Basra, Najaf, Mosul and Kirkuk and a recount, if one can be done, should cover all such areas. Read the rest of this entry »
Turkey enters northern Iraq
Wait, wait! Don’t panic after looking at the headline. True, Turkey has entered northern Iraq, but unlike its past entries, it did it this time with diplomacy, peace and brotherhood.
Two years after a terrorist attack on the Dağlıca military outpost, which had brought the two countries to the brink of war, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu orchestrated a huge initiative of friendship and peace toward northern Iraq with his visit on Friday and Saturday. Being the lead figure of a Turkish foreign policy that has dispensed with its rigid habits and has undertaken a radical paradigm shift in parallel to the country’s painful process of evolution from a national security state to a democratic one, Davutoğlu visited Arbil, the most critical step of his unusual visit to Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »
Mahmur camp’s future unclear
The 12,000 Turkish citizens who live in the U.N.-supervised Mahmur camps in northern Iraq will only return back to Turkey if the Kurdish problem is resolved, one local official said.
The refugees crossed over to Iraq in 1994 from the southeastern provinces of Şırnak and Hakkari during the heaviest clashes between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and the military.
Turkey’s efforts to resolve the Kurdish issue had local repercussions, said one local official who wanted to remain anonymous, adding that the only viable way for the refugees to return to their homes was the resolution of the Kurdish problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Turkey sends observers to Iraq elections, early voting begins
Hurriyet
A group of Turkish observers will monitor Saturday’s Iraqi provincial elections as polling stations opened across the country on Wednesday in the first stage of the provincial election, the nation’s first ballot since 2005.
Turkish observers, consisting of 26 academicians, researchers and representatives of think-tanks, will monitor elections together with nearly 1,000 foreign observers in Iraq, the Anatolian Agency reported.
About 614,000 police, soldiers, hospital patients and prisoners are entitled to vote at 1,672 established polling centers that opened at 7:00 a.m. (0400 GMT) and will close at 5:00 p.m. Read the rest of this entry »
Turkmens, Turkmeneli and the Musul Region
By Orhan Ketene
Northern Iraq or the Musul Region is home of the Iraqi Turkmens for over a millennium. The economic and strategic importance of this land, had made it one of the most sensitive parts of the Middle East in general and of Iraq in particular. Read the rest of this entry »