Kurdistan: Dangerous Passage; Turkey embraces 'hot pursuit' in northern Iraq.

Byline: Owen Matthews (With Sami Kohen in Istanbul, John Barry in Washington and Scott Johnson in Baghdad)

Could another front be opening in the Iraq war? Over recent weeks, some 200,000 Turkish troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, have massed along the mountainous border with Iraq. Trucks passing from Turkey, ferrying the imported goods and foodstuffs that are the lifeblood of the Kurdish economy, have slowed from 1,000 a day to just a couple of hundred. The Turkish military says its troops are there only to prevent armed insurgents of the Kurdish PKK rebel group from crossing into Turkey from their bases on Iraq's Kandil Mountain. But last week, according to angry Foreign Ministry officials in Baghdad, Turkish commandos briefly crossed 15 kilometers into Iraqi territory in pursuit of PKK rebels--a move that could signal dangerous new frictions to come.

Compared with the rest of the country, Iraqi Kurdistan has been a haven of stability--still subject to insurgent bombings, but generally free of the kind of sectarian violence that has racked Baghdad and other major cities in recent weeks. But tensions are rising. Shia militiamen from Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army have begun moving into oil-rich Kirkuk, claimed as part of Kurdistan. In neighboring Iran last month some 10,000 troops attacked PKK-affiliated rebels who defy Tehran's rule in the region. And the Turks have grown increasingly frustrated with the 5,000 guerrillas holed up at Kandil. Over the last two months, the PKK and its political affiliates have stepped up violence inside Turkey to levels not seen in a decade. At least eight government troops were killed in a series of ambushes in Turkey's southeast; two bombs linked to the PKK were planted in Istanbul and, last month, 14 civilians were killed as Kurdish cities all over the southeast erupted in violence.

Ankara is losing patience with the United States, which has promised to deal with the PKK problem. Last week Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, chief of the politically powerful General Staff, claimed that Turkey had the right to defend itself under the United Nations Charter, hinting strongly that the military was seriously considering hot-pursuit cross-border raids. (Before Saddam was toppled in 2003, Turkish troops used to cross the border regularly chasing the PKK, often with the connivance of local Iraqi Kurdish groups which had their own differences with the PKK.) And Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Ankara last week to try to defuse the crisis, that "we ...