A group of 300 Turkish troops crossed into Kurdish territory in northern Iraq overnight and moved about three kilometres deeper into Iraq on Tuesday morning. A senior Iraqi military source said the Turkish troops were lightly armed and moved into the Gali Rash area, a mountainous district near the border.
This first ground incursion comes as Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, made an unannounced visit to Kirkuk in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
Turkey says it wants to flush out Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) fighters that carry out attacks on Turkey from bases in Iraq.
Jabbar Yawar, a spokesman for the Kurdish peshmerga security force, confirmed the incursion. Yawar said: "The area they entered is a deserted area and there is no Iraqi force or peshmerga deployed there."
Fouad Hussein, head of the office of Kurdish regional president, Mahmoud Barzani, said: "We condemn this incursion. Turkey wants to transfer the problem on to the territory of Iraqi Kurdistan." A website linked to the party of Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, said as many as 700 Turkish troops had gone as far as eight kilometres into Iraq.
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