Kurdish rebels free Turkish troops

Eight Turkish soldiers captured by Kurdish separatists were released Sunday, helping ease a standoff between two of Washington’s most trusted regional allies.

The soldiers were captured in an Oct. 21 ambush by the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, an attack that also left 12 Turkish troops dead and ignited outrage across Turkey.

The eight, all reportedly in good health, were flown to a Turkish army base.

The attacks by the Turkish Kurds have sparked a crisis between Turkey, a U.S. ally and North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, and Iraqi Kurds, who are America’s most unabashed supporters in Iraq. Turkey has ordered 100,000 troops to the frontier and threatened to invade Iraq to root out PKK camps in the mountains of the Kurdistan semiautonomous region.

The U.S. has urged restraint and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to arrive in Washington in the coming days for talks with President Bush and other officials.

“What has happened is a new message from the Kurdistan government to Turkey, and it is a good step,” Fuad Hussein, an Iraqi Kurdish official, told reporters in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil on Sunday. “We are waiting for the Turkish response.”

Iraq’s Kurds occupy a Switzerland-sized enclave all but separate from the rest of the country. The area has become a haven for Kurdish opposition groups fighting for cultural and political rights in Turkey, Iran and Syria, which all have restive Kurdish minorities.

The PKK attacks have put Iraqi Kurds in a difficult position. They are reluctant to turn their weapons on ethnic brethren in the PKK or give Turks approval for a military operation and have scrambled to come up with a way to resolve the issue peacefully.

The Turkish soldiers’ release followed negotiations between Kurdish security officials, ethnic Turkmen parties based in Iraq and a political group considered an offshoot of the PKK. The Baghdad government also claimed a role in the talks.

The eight troops were released to security officials in northern Iraq on Sunday morning, transferred to the U.S. military base in Mosul and flown by helicopter to a base the Turkish army holds near the northern Iraqi town of Amadiya, said high-ranking Kurdish officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

The secretive PKK, which has fought an on-and-off guerrilla war against the Ankara government since 1984, said it released the soldiers in hopes of staving off Turkish airstrikes.

“We have started this good step in order to achieve peace,” a PKK spokesman said on Roj TV, a Kurdish satellite channel.

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daragahi@latimes.com

Special correspondent Ahmed reported from Zakho and Times staff writer Daragahi from Sulaymaniya, Iraq.