Iraq demands withdrawal of Turkish troops from area near Mosul

Iraq says Turkey is infringing on its sovereignty by stationing troops near the ISIS-held city of Mosul.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu played down the military activity as “routine rotation activity” and “reinforcement against security risks”, while also labelling any misinterpretation as a “provocation”.

The statement called on Turkey to “respect good neighbourly relations and to withdraw immediately from the Iraqi territory”.

The “troop deployment in northern Iraq serves as a deterrent” against attempts by groups including the PKK to expand their influence into Iraq, according to Mehmet Kaya, head of the Tigris Communal Research Center in Diyarbakir, a Kurdish-dominated city in southeast Turkey.

But the Iraqi foreign ministry described the deployment of troops as “an incursion” and rejected any military operation that is not coordinated with the federal government in Baghdad.

Turkish media reported that around 150 Turkish soldiers backed by 20 to 25 tanks had been sent by road to the Bashiqa area near Mosul, the Islamic State group’s main hub in Iraq.

Turkish army sources said Saturday that they had been training fighters across four provinces in northern Iraq to combat ISIL.

Iraq should be clear about avoiding to fall in the middle of the axes of war and withdraw from its territory any possible foreign interference taking place in the future, he concluded.

A senior Kurdish military officer based on the Bashiqa front-line told Reuters that additional Turkish trainers had arrived at a camp in the area overnight on Thursday escorted by a Turkish protection force.

The Turkish deployment is just the latest in a series of challenges over the past week that have pushed him to take a hard line on foreign forces helping Iraq against IS, which overran large parts of the country a year ago. A battalion of soldiers has gone there. “Turkey is not after any country’s soil”, Davutoglu said.

They fresh Turkish troops will be deployed in the Mosul region as well as the Soran and Qalacholan districts near the Iranian border. The training was instrumental for Kurdish forces in retaking Yazidi-majority town Sinjar from the IS last month.

Turkey depends on outside suppliers for 90.5 percent of its oil and 98.5 percent of its natural gas, the president said.

Turkey has close relations with the Kurdish regional government.

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday said that Ankara could find alternatives to Russian oil and gas, as bilateral tensions escalated over the downing of a Russian warplane.