Kurds carrying a banner with portraits of Ocalan, vowing to resist Turkish troops

LONDON, March 2 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – As the Turkish parliament voted down Saturday, March 1, a motion to allow the deployment of 62,000 U.S. soldiers in the country for a possible attack on neighboring Iraq, Kurds in northern Iraq vowed to shoot Turkish forces who cross border in the event of war on Iraq, a leading British newspaper reported Sunday, March 2.

“Our 300 men would rather fight and die than come under Turkish orders,” the Telegraph quoted as saying Cdr Kemal Musa Faqi, a leader of a Kurdish armed faction and one of the Kurds who fear that the looming U.S.-led war on Iraq would help Turkey crack down hard on the Kurdish community in northern Iraq.

"If the Turks are coming there will be war here. I myself will take my gun and shoot every Turk I see," he said. “Everybody here, the men, women and children, will fight the Turks.”

The Kurds, said Cdr Musa, harbor grudge towards the Turks, noting that it was even fiercer than hatred to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who has orchestrated the death of hundreds of thousands of Kurds since taking power in the 1960s.

Iraqi Kurds contend that they would rather live under a national 'unjust' regime, than be under foreign occupation.

"We expect them to be much worse to the Kurds than any one else. Saddam's forces are better than the Turkish; both are dictators but he is Iraqi and we are Iraqi also," the daily quoted him as saying.

He urged Britain to help Kurds stave off any Turkish attack as it did in 1917, when the British army drove the Ottomans out.

"We would like to know if the British Army will help us like in 1917 when they drove the Ottoman out," he said. "We had some problems with them after that but they helped us then. We would like them to help us now."

Although Cdr Musa's men are only armed with a meager three rocket launchers and two heavy machine-guns, nonetheless, years of warfare in the Zagros Mountains have honed the Peshmerga, Cdr’s men, into a formidable army.

"We have defended our lands for almost 100 years. The mountains are our friends and the caves our barracks. We will never give up our guns," Cdr Musa said determinedly.

On Thursday, February 27, Tayyip Erdogan, chairman of the ruling AKP party, said there would be "twice as many" Turkish soldiers as American troops in northern Iraq.

Nasreen Mustafa Sidiq, the minister of reconstruction and development in Arbil, warned for her part of the “unforeseen consequences” if the Turks entered the area.

"If Turkish soldiers come here, to Arbil, I will hate the Turks. We will use what we have, even our lives, if we have to," she vowed.

Turkey is gripped by the fear of a repetition of the 1991 crisis when 450,000 Iraqi Kurdish refugees flooded the country and that another Gulf war might spur a second exodus.

Turkey has demanded that its troops be allowed to take over a swath of territory along the border inside Iraq with an ostensible reason to prevent a flood of Kurdish refugees trying to flee into Turkey, but the Kurdish parties say they are quite capable of doing this themselves.

On Saturday, Turkey's parliament has narrowly failed to approve the deployment of U.S. troops on its territory for a possible war with neighboring Iraq, upsetting U.S. warplanes.

Of the 534 MPs present in the assembly hall, 264 voted in favor of the motion, 250 voted against and 19 abstained, Arinc announced.

"The motion has been rejected because it has failed the muster the necessary majority," said Speaker of the Turkish Parliament Bulent Arinc.