Monday, February 05, 2007

DAR AL ISLAM - IRAN / TURKEY: IRAN COURTS TURKEY, TURKEY LOOKS TOWARDS THE SHI'ITE CRESCENT

Turkey Eyes the Shia Crescent
Iran clearly seeks to lure Turkey away from its traditional moorings to the West, and the Kurds may be just the wedge it needs.


Feb. 12, 2007 issue - If you were a mullah in Tehran facing a new western "coalition of the willing," there's one country you would try to get on your side: next-door NATO neighbor, Turkey. And lately, the Iranians have been doing this quite well. The reason: Ankara and Tehran increasingly share a cause that unites them: Kurdish guerrillas operating in northern Iraq, and America's failure to do anything about them.

It would be premature to speak of any entente. Yet Iran clearly seeks to lure Turkey away from its traditional moorings to the West, and the Kurds may be just the wedge they need. During visits to Ankara in recent months, Iranian officials and other state representatives—including Ali Larijani, head of the supreme National Security Council—have gone out of their way to stress the troubles created for both nations by the PKK terrorist movement. Despite myriad promises, U.S. troops in the region do nothing to prevent cross-border raids. Suggesting that Turkey should join with Iran and Syria to establish a tripartite platform of security cooperation against the Kurdish separatists, Larijani and others impressed upon their counterparts the advantages of a large-scale Turkish military incursion to clean out the guerillas—possibly in coordination with Iranian forces, according to Turkish and Iranian news reports.

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You may also be interested in any other stories that I have here that may mention the Shi'ite Crescent...

Here are the results of a search of Thoughts of American Infidel that deal with the subject: search results.

Well, I hope the works, if not, just use the search function and type in 'shiite crescent'...


Pertinent Links:

1) Turkey Eyes the Shia Crescent

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