Turkey Expands Military Options

The Turkish parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill granting the government unlimited authority to send Turkish troops overseas and to allow foreign troops to be based in Turkey. The move comes amid widespread expectation that the Bush administration will ask the country to join its military campaign against Taliban forces and suspected terrorists in Afghanistan.

The bill was approved by a vote of 319 to 101 during a stormy session. Members of the pro-Islamic opposition took turns attacking the decree, saying leftist Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit had failed to explain what the United States was demanding of Turkey.

Ecevit later took the floor and said, “The struggle in Afghanistan against the archaic regime that hosts terrorism must be carried out until the end.” But he added that “there has been no request from the U.S. for troops so far.”

Recent polls show that most Turks are opposed to Turkish military involvement in Afghanistan.

Turkey is the only predominantly Muslim member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Strategically placed at the crossroads of the Balkans, the Middle East and the oil-rich republics of formerly Soviet Central Asia, Turkey is also Israel’s closest regional ally. For the past decade, U.S. and British warplanes have used a NATO base at Incirlik, about 60 miles from Syria’s border and 320 miles from Iraq’s, to patrol a “no-fly” zone over Kurdish-populated northern Iraq.

Turkey has opened its skies and bases to U.S. military planes in the war against global terrorism but has made it clear to Washington that it does not want to see the current operation extended to Iraq. Turkey’s deepest concern is that overthrowing President Saddam Hussein could result in the emergence of an independent Kurdish state on its borders. That could fuel separatist sentiments among Turkey’s own 13 million ethnic Kurds.

“Turkey’s participation in the ongoing military campaign against the Taliban is principally aimed at bolstering U.S. efforts to prove to the Muslim world that the offensive is not targeting Muslims but terrorists and their supporters,” said Hasan Koni, a political science professor who advises Turkey’s National Security Council. “It will be symbolic and nothing more.”