Iraqi leaders criticized Turkey on Monday for bombing Kurdish militants in northern Iraq in air strikes that they said left at least one woman dead.
The Turkish attacks in Dahuk Province on Sunday - involving artillery and dozens of warplanes - amounted to the largest known cross-border incursion since 2003, and they occurred with at least tacit approval of U.S. officials.
The Iraqi government, however, said it had neither been consulted nor informed.
Masoud Barzani, leader of the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, condemned the assaults as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty that undermined months of diplomacy. "These attacks hinder the political efforts exerted to find peaceful solution based on mutual respect," he said in a statement.
At a news conference in Najaf, he went further, declaring that "the Americans are responsible because the Iraqi sky is under their full control." The bombing raids focused on an area where some commanders for the Kurdish militant group, the Kurdistan Workers Party, known by its Kurdish acronym PKK, are believed to have been hiding.
The Turkish government, in a statement on its Web site, said that it was still assessing the impact of the attack but that "all the planned targets were hit accurately." Turkey, a NATO member, has thousands of troops at the Iraqi border and had been threatening a military operation into northern Iraq, but it appears to be sticking to a more limited offensive, as the United States has requested.
The assault Sunday was the second set of strikes against the Kurdish militant group since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey met with President George W. Bush in Washington last month. In the first strikes, on Dec. 1, artillery was fired from Turkish territory.
The Iraqis have pledged to rein in the Kurdish militants, who have bases in Turkey and Iraq and have been fighting the Turkish military since the 1980s. But Turkey says the Iraqi government is not doing enough, and the issue has caused great tension between the neighbors.
Elsewhere in Iraq, at least 20 people were killed or found dead in and around Baquba, the largest city in Diyala Province, which is north of Baghdad. The police said that a suicide motorcycle bomber had killed at least 7 people and wounded 24 in one of the city markets. Six were killed in two separate shootouts. Two died from roadside bombs, and the authorities found six bodies in two locations on the western outskirts of the city.
It was one of the deadliest days in weeks in the city, which has recently been handed over to a new American brigade.
Farther north, near the Mosul dam, which has been described as fragile by some engineers, a truck bomb severely damaged a bridge over the Tigris, killing at least one member of the Iraqi security forces.
In central Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded, killing two people riding on a passing minibus and wounding seven others, police and hospital officials said.
Meanwhile, Ayman al-Zawahri,a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, warned of "traitors" among insurgents in Iraq and called on Iraqi Sunni Arab tribes to purge those who help the Americans in a new videotape posted Monday on the Web.
Zawahri's comments were aimed at undermining Iraqi "awakening councils," the groups of Iraqi Sunni tribesmen that the United States military has backed to help fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia - the homegrown extremist group that claims allegiance to Bin Laden's group - and its allies.
Some Sunni insurgent groups have fought alongside American forces, and the United States military has touted the councils as a major factor in reducing violence in war-torn regions like Anbar Province.
The mujahedeen "must throw out the bribe-taking collaborators from among their ranks, those who sold out their faith and fight under the banner of the cross," Zawahri said in the video. "They must expose them to the Muslim world. Those who support the Americans are despicable scum."
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