A dispute between Iraq and Turkey over a recent deadly attack in Iraq's northern Kurdish region escalated at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.
Iraq's foreign minister demanded the withdrawal of all Turkish troops from his country, while Turkey's deputy ambassador said his government will keep pursuing fighters it considers terrorists who take refuge in Iraq.
At the start of the Security Council meeting, the UN special envoy for Iraq had said Turkey and Iraq were ready for a joint investigation into the artillery shelling at the Parkha resort in the Zakho district of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Iraq's Hussein called on the Security Council to set up "an international independent team of inquiry" to look into what he called the Turkish army's "flagrant aggression."
He said some Iraqi authorities were on the same page as Turkey and "wanted to find out the truth." But other Iraqi officials, he said, "chose escalation instead of diplomacy and cooperation," and started a media "smear campaign" aimed at driving a wedge between the Turkish and Iraqi people. He called on the Security Council to urgently adopt a resolution demanding that Turkey withdraw what he said were about 4,000 combat soldiers from Iraq, and halt incursions into Iraqi airspace.
Turkey estimates the PKK controls an area of "at least 10,000 square kilometres in Iraq," he said. "Nearly 800 villages have been forcefully evacuated by the PKK and all these spots have become a safe haven for the terrorists." In the first six months of this year the PKK carried out 339 attacks against Turkey, he said.