Turkish Attack on Iraq Imminent?

According to Debka.com, an attack by 70,000 Turkish troops on Mosul and Kirkuk is imminent. From their website:

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Wednesday, December 25, Talabani is to be joined in Turkey by his former rival and fellow chief of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party-KDP. Together with Turkish political and military leaders and US representatives, they will try and hammer out an historic Turkish-Kurdish accord based on a text drafted in Washington.

Its key elements are:

A. The Kurdish autonomous government of northern Iraq will grant 70,000 Turkish troops of the 2nd and 3rd Corps free passage through its territory for the Turkish push towards the big northern Iraqi oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul.

B. While transiting this enclave, Turkish troops will show every respect for Kurdish autonomy, thereby also conferring tacit recognition on the part of Ankara.

C. The Turkish contingents will seize control the two oil cities with the support of Iraqi ethnic Turkoman units, who will be said to have risen up against Saddam Hussein’s domination of their region. For the moment, the Kurds will not press claims to Iraqi oilfields.

D. Turkey will then proceed to create an autonomous Turkoman entity stretching from northern to central Iraq up to the approaches to Baghdad.

E. The United States and Turkey will foster political, defensive and economic cooperation between the Kurdish and Turkoman self-governing provinces and guarantee their security. This clause indicates that a portion of North Iraq’s oil revenues will be channeled to the Kurdish province.

In advance of this conference, the Turkish army was placed Tuesday, December 24, on a high state of preparedness and the 2nd and 3d corps deployed along the Iraqi border in battle array.

According to DEBKAfile’s military sources, the successful outcome of the three-way parley on this document will open the way for a possible Turkish invasion of northern Iraq and its advance on the oil cities without waiting for the general American offensive to begin on other fronts.

While one can gainsay anything found on Debka.com, they are not a bunch of web wildmen. They have presaged some serious movements in the past. Believe them or not, it makes good reading. The entire article can be found here.