U.S. Frees 11 Turk Soldiers in Baghdad

In a bid to defuse a diplomatic crisis with a key NATO ally, the United States on Sunday freed 11 Turkish special forces soldiers arrested in a raid in northern Iraq last week, Turkey’s state-run news agency said.

The soldiers were released in Baghdad, where they were being interrogated about their alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate the ethnic Kurdish governor of the oil-rich province of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, according to Turkish media reports.

A Turkish military helicopter was expected early today to fly the men from the Iraqi capital back to their headquarters in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah, where they were detained Friday, the private CNN-TURK and NTV news channels reported. However, a U.S. Embassy spokesman was unable to confirm that the men had been released.

The soldiers, including a colonel and two majors, were freed after a day of intensive diplomacy that included phone calls between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vice President Dick Cheney, during which Erdogan repeated demands for the Turks’ immediate and unconditional release.

Turkish officials said Cheney and Erdogan agreed to set up a joint committee to investigate events leading up to Friday’s raid by about 100 U.S. troops on three offices housing Turkish special forces as well as members of an ethnic Turkish faction known as the Turkmen Front.

The front is widely believed to be armed and trained by Turkey as part of Ankara’s efforts to curb the influence of ethnic Kurds in the region. Despite repeated appeals by the United States, Turkish forces allegedly were continuing to provide weapons to the group apparently to be used against local Kurdish leaders, according to a senior Iraqi Kurdish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that forces of the 173rd Airborne Brigade conducted the raid, detaining 24 people suspected of plotting “to harm Iraqi civilian officials.”

Turkey’s civilian leaders and influential generals have denied such a plot.

“It is a disgusting incident,” said Gen. Hursit Tolon, a leading Turkish military commander. “A NATO member arresting soldiers from a fellow NATO country, staging a raid without even providing an explanation or informing us in advance is unprecedented,” he said, adding that Turkey was withdrawing two liaison officers from U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., in protest.

Hidayet Eris, the Turkish official in charge of an investigative team dispatched to Sulaymaniyah, told Turkey’s state-run Anatolia news agency that Turkish forces’ communication equipment had been destroyed in the raid and that an unspecified number of weapons and computers had been seized.

Relations between Ankara and Washington have been shaky at best since the Turkish parliament in March rejected a bill that would have allowed thousands of U.S. troops to use Turkey as a springboard for invading Iraq. Anti-American sentiment has risen palpably here in recent months, and on Sunday, police in Istanbul used tear gas to disperse hundreds of ultranationalist protesters who shredded and set fire to U.S. flags.

About 2,000 Turkish troops are stationed in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq, part of a force dispatched there after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Their mission has been to flush out Turkish Kurd rebels holed up in the rugged mountains separating Turkey from Iraq and to deter Iraqi Kurds from forming an independent state with control over oil-rich Kirkuk.

The U.S. reportedly is working with the Turks to secure the surrender in Iraq of the Turkish Kurd rebel group known as the PKK in exchange for an amnesty for guerrillas who can prove they were not involved in violence. A withdrawal of Turkish troops from northern Iraq would follow.