U.S. Jets Take Off From Turkish Bases for Raids : Allies: The action opens up a second front in the conflict. It is a risky political gamble for President Ozal.

Opening a second front in the gulf war, American warplanes flying from Turkish bases are attacking targets in Iraq, Western diplomats and Turkish officials said here Friday.

They described Turkish government support for raids against Iraq as a risky political gamble by President Turgut Ozal.

The sources said the first strike came before dawn Friday when American fighter-bombers from Incirlik Air Base, near the southern Turkish city of Adana, struck in northern Iraq.

A spokesman at the NATO base, where the number of U.S. combat aircraft doubled from 48 to 96 this week and American military personnel is approaching 4,000, declined to comment on the reports, which also appeared in Turkish newspapers.

“The flights started as training, but they had permission beforehand, and afterward they may have gone somewhere else,” Ozal observed ambiguously in a television interview Friday night.

Turkish reporters camped outside the big base 460 miles from Iraq counted the takeoff of 27 U.S. F-111 bombers, F-16 fighter-bombers and F-15 interceptors accompanied by four in-flight refueling tankers. The planes left at 1:30 a.m. and returned three hours later, the Turkish journalists reported. The base spokesman said the planes had flown a night training exercise.

The howl of jet engines, and the harmless accidental discharge of a rocket from one of the F-15s, kept Adana dogs baying deep into the night.

A senior Turkish official and a Western diplomat said some of the jets had landed at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization base at Batman near the Iraqi border to refuel, and some had bombed in northern Iraq. The source had no information on the planes’ targets, but Turkish newspapers said they had attacked mobile missile sites.

The jets thundered into the cold black night a few hours after the Turkish Parliament had approved a war powers bill at Ozal’s prodding.

“The Americans can use Turkish bases at will,” the Turkish official said. “The only condition is coordination with the Turkish general staff.”

In Islamic Turkey, there is no love lost for Saddam Hussein, but Ozal’s unabashed support for the United States in the gulf crisis and his dream of making Turkey a regional superpower have divided the country.

Since the foundation of the modern Turkish republic in the 1920s, Turkey has calculatingly and effectively kept out of disputes between its Arab neighbors.

“There’s no point getting involved in this bloody business,” said Oktay Eksi, senior columnist for the nationalist daily Hurriyet. “It is contrary to our historical principle in international affairs, peace at home, peace abroad. It’s completely gone.”

After Thursday’s parliamentary vote, the Cabinet reasserted that Turkey would not itself join the war unless attacked. Columnist Eksi, however, said he fears that a hawkish faction in Ankara hoped for an Iraqi retaliation as a pretext for attacking along a 200-mile border.

“We are preparing to enter Iraq,” declared the newspaper Sabah in a front-page headline. Ozal says he would have U.S. support for a Turkish ground attack if Syria or Iran sought to exploit a power vacuum in postwar Iraq.

In recent days, military observers say, Turkey has strongly reinforced a 100,000-man army along the border with some of its best troops and equipment. About eight Iraqi divisions, mostly second-line units also totaling around 100,000 men, have held defensive positions on their side of the frontier, but Turkish newspapers say some units have been moved south toward Kuwait since the war began.

“Although the government says Turkey will not hit Iraq unless attacked, by allowing U.S. planes to launch attacks against Iraq, it will have invited Iraq’s hostility and drag Turkey into a war with its neighbor,” Erdal Inonu, head of the main opposition Social Democrat Populist Party, told Parliament.

In a country starkly divided along party lines, Ozal’s opposition on the left and right accuse him of seeking war to improve his low popularity at home--and possibly to recover Mosul and Kirkuk, oil-rich provinces lost in 1926 to British-mandated Iraq.

Among the Turks suspicious of Ozal’s intent are many members of the Turkish armed forces, which are weaned on noninterventionism as a basis of national defense.

In seconding Parliament’s war powers vote Thursday, Ozal’s Cabinet ordered the Turkish general staff to “make necessary preparations to allow operations to be carried out, when deemed necessary.”