| | | | After months of wrangling between the US and Turkey over the possible deployment, and even though the Turkish parliament voted to authorise the government to send troops, the matter is closed, the President said at a reception to mark the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic.
“The issue of the dispatch of Turkish soldiers to Iraq has come to an end for me,” Sezer told reporters. “The settlement of necessary conditions is henceforth quite difficult.”
In the past week, Washington has backed off from its request for Turkey to send up to 10,000 troops to Iraq to serve as peace keepers due to increasing opposition from Iraqi leaders. A further stumbling block has been the conditions Ankara set for the deployment, including having control of its own discrete zone of operations, and for its troops to be under direct Turkish command. | |
