(Guardian) - Diplomats fly to Ankara to stop military move against Iraqi Kurds after 'genocide' resolution
Senior US officials were engaged last night in last-ditch efforts to persuade Turkey not to launch a major military incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan to target armed separatists.
A team was diverted from a mission to Russia to make an unscheduled stop in Ankara yesterday. Against the background of the escalating diplomatic row between Turkey and the US over a congressional resolution that branded as 'genocide' massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, revealed she had personally urged Turkey to refrain from any major military operation in northern Iraq. The row between the two Nato allies comes against the dangerous background of a threat by the Turkish parliament to approve this week a 'hot pursuit' of the Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, across the border into northern Iraq.