TURKEY: The prospect of Turkish forces crossing the border into northern Iraq in tandem with an American northern assault against President Saddam Hussein has emerged as one of the few rallying points for the disparate groups of the Iraqi opposition.
Opposition to the presence of Turkish troops in Northern Iraq has become a unifying force for the aspiring politicians who are meeting in the mountain redoubt of a regional Kurdish warlord in an attempt to establish their credentials as a post-war governing alliance.
In Salahuddin yesterday, opposition leaders announced that they would send delegations to Ankara and Washington to explain to the Americans and the Turks that the presence of Turkish troops in Northern Iraq would not only be unnecessary but could damage post-war peace hopes.
"We want to confront this issue of a possible Turkish military intervention and lay out our common position that all the Iraqi opposition is united in opposing, as a principle, any military intervention in Iraq's unity and integrity," said Mr Hoshyar Zebari, the director of international relations for the Kurdish Democratic Party.
"Instead of Kurds versus Turks, this is the unanimous view of all the Iraqi opposition because we see the possibility of very serious consequences for regional stability and for the overall campaign for the liberation of Iraq," Mr Zebari told reporters at a briefing on progress in the meeting that is taking place at the headquarters of the Kurdish Democratic Party.
He declined to elaborate on what he meant by "serious consequences", which has become diplomatic code for armed action in relation to Saddam Hussein's failure to co-operate with the United Nations on the issue of weapons of mass destruction.
But he said that the presence of Turkish troops would be a "destabilising factor" and warned that "there would be problems, clashes."
Turkey's parliament yesterday postponed until tomorrow a vote on allowing the United States to use the country's military bases to prosecute a northern front in a military operation to remove President Saddam from power.
Turkey is widely expected to grant the Americans access, in return for a significant financial and aid package and an agreement for up to 40,000 Turkish troops to cross its southeastern border into northern Iraq.
Turkey has said that it wishes to deploy troops in Northern Iraq to stem a tide of refugees that might surge towards the border in the event of a war against the Ba'athist forces. Local Kurdish leaders say, however, that they will be able to control any such situation themselves.
The population of the predominantly Kurdish region suspects Turkish ambitions for Northern Iraq, especially the oil-producing centre of Mosul, which was the Ottoman regional capital.
The opposition to Turkey sending in troops has enabled the fractious opposition groups to coalesce around a cause that has great resonance with a local population that has little regard for the exiled groups clamouring for a stake in Iraq's future.
"We have been like a rag doll in the hands of all sides, but no more," said Ms Nasreen Rashid, the deputy co-ordinator of the Khatuzeen Centre for Social Action in Irbil.
"We are used to freedom, and we are not going to have it taken away from us again, believe me," she said, hitting on the crux of Turkey's fears that Kurds could press for independence in the wake of war.
Rather than focus on the fractious nature of the opposition, which appears to have realised that its infighting and inability to present a credible leadership profile has damaged its stance with Washington, some analysts said that the issue of a Turkish troop presence had presented the groups with a genuine unifying opportunity that could help dispel Turkey's scepticism about a Kurdish independence agenda.
"They haven't had anything to bring them together, and this issue of a Turkish military presence on what they regard as their homeland has, oddly enough, driven them to identify themselves more as Iraqis, united against the Turks, than even Saddam has," said a Western diplomat.
"The Turks just don't think the Kurds are strong enough to stop us doing what we want to do, and the Americans are probably trying to restrain the Turks but would like them in the region to provide an element of restraint on the Kurds," the diplomat said.
The meeting continues today, in the presence of Mr Zalmay Kahlilzad, President Bush's envoy to the Iraqi opposition.