ANKARA: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused Tuesday to rule out the possibility of military operations in northern Iraq to root out armed Kurdish separatist groups that he said had taken refuge in the border region.
Erdogan also criticized some Western countries for what he called their increasingly hawkish stance against Iran.
Meeting with a group of foreign journalists on the eve of his trip to the United States to meet with President George W. Bush and others attending the United Nations General Assembly next week, Erdogan said that despite the relative calm in the northern region of Iraq bordering Turkey, all options remained open in his country's struggle against Kurdish separatist militants.
"No country can continue living under the constant threat of terrorism," Erdogan said in his office at his party headquarters in Ankara. "This struggle has the same legitimacy for Turkey as it has for the U.S., Spain or United Kingdom."
The PKK, or Kurdish Worker's Party, has been operating in Turkey since the 1980s, pressing demands for a separate Kurdish state in a conflict that has taken more than 30,000 lives............
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