- DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Washington
has promised to protect Kurdish-held northern Iraq from an attack by Saddam
Hussein during any military action to topple him, the head of one of the
Kurdish factions controlling the region said.
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- Jalal Talabani, whose Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)
along with another Kurdish group has had control of northern Iraq since
the 1991 Gulf War, said the United States had also signaled it would not
impose a dictator to replace Saddam.
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- "The Iraqi opposition has asked the United States...to
acknowledge the effective parties on the Iraqi scene are the ones who must
undertake changing and replacing the regime along with the United States,"
Talabani told Reuters late on Saturday while in Damascus for talks with
Syrian officials.
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- "They must also be in charge of the future of Iraq.
Where the Kurds are concerned we have asked for a guarantee that the Kurdish
region be protected from any possible Iraqi attack. The Americans have
promised to fulfil these requests," he said.
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- Since 1991, U.S. and British jets have protected the
slice of northern Iraq where the PUK and another Iraqi Kurdish faction,
the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), make up the largest armed opposition
to Saddam inside Iraq.
-
- Control of the region would likely figure into any U.S.
plan for a strike against the Baghdad government, which used air power
against the Iraqi Kurds who Washington urged to rebel in 1991 but declined
to back up militarily.
-
- Washington has courted the main Iraqi opposition groups
while building a case for a strike on Iraq, and Talabani said an opposition
summit later this month in Brussels should make it clear that Iraqis themselves
must bring down and replace Saddam.
-
- "I hope the meeting will call for comprehensive
democratic change in Iraq, at the hands of effective Iraqi forces on the
ground and with global and regional help, including from America...and
for Iraq to not be subject to invasion," he said.
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- "It would be an invasion if a sizeable American
force came, occupied the capital and (the rest of) Iraq and imposed the
sort of rule it wanted."
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- Iraq's neighbors -- particularly Turkey, which has fought
a lengthy campaign against Kurdish separatists -- fear the country could
disintegrate after Saddam and that a Kurdish state could emerge in the
area the PUK and KDP control.
-
- The reopening of the Iraqi Kurdish regional parliament
this month drew warnings from Turkey that it would never allow a breakaway
Kurdish state, but Talabani said Iraqi Kurds continued to see their future
in a federal, democratic Iraq.
-
- "The threats circulating over a Kurdish state are
empty, because there isn't going to be a Kurdish state, nor is there anyone
angling for an independent Kurdish state," he said.
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