By Ruth Gidley
LONDON, Feb 22 (Reuters AlertNet) - Hundreds of Kurdish families have fled the remote mountain villages of northern Iraq after months of Turkish bombardments, leaving few civilians at risk from a new overland assault by Turkey's army.
Aid workers believe those still in the area are mainly men who have stayed on to look after sheep and goats.
Turkish TV and a senior military source say thousands of troops have crossed into northern Iraq in their hunt for Kurdish PKK guerrillas, in an escalation of a conflict that could destabilise the region, although Iraq's foreign minister says just a few hundred troops were involved.
The Iraqi Red Crescent said there were sketchy reports from IRC officials in the region that people were leaving the border area, but no details of how many.
"There are some displaced people," IRC president Said Hakki told Reuters. "We are still assessing how many families and if there are any casualties."
But Karin Martinussen of aid agency Norwegian People's Aid, which has worked for many years with communities affected by landmines in northern Iraq, said by phone from Suleimaniyah that most people in the sparsely populated mountains near Turkey had already moved out of the area to escape the bombardments that had been going on since December.
"I suspect there are hardly any people left," she said.
Over the past five months, Turkey, which has massed up to 100,000 troops near its border with Iraq, has carried out occasional air and artillery strikes and small-scale raids by ground forces across the border against PKK targets. Ankara says the PKK are using northern Iraq as a base to launch cross-border attacks in their campaign for a separate homeland in Turkey's southeast.
Kurds - a non-Arab, mainly Sunni Muslim people, whose language is related to Persian - live in Armenia, Iran and Syria, as well as Turkey and Iraq.
Martinussen said most villagers had left the small, remote farms near the border where they kept sheep and goats to seek refuge with relatives or in nearby towns such as Dohuk.
Some 1,255 people fled their homes in the Qandil mountains after Turkish aerial attacks in late 2007, according to the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR. A few people stayed behind to look after the animals, but the women and children from the 32 affected villages have gone.
"They will go to the nearest place where they have families," Martinussen said.
She said people in Kurdistan were unlikely to be hit hard unless Turkey's offensive extended well beyond the area it had already been bombing, and northern Iraq felt safe.
"Most Kurdish people don't believe Turkey will invade the whole of Kurdistan," she said.
Northern Iraq, which has long been run has a semi-autonomous zone by predominantly Kurdish authorities - has been spared the worst of the sectarian violence that's torn apart communities in much of the rest of the country, and has been a relatively safe haven for Iraqis from the south and centre of the country. It is home to more than 163,000 displaced people, according to UNHCR.
UNHCR head Antonio Guterres said back in October he was worried there could be a refugee crisis if Turkey's attacks escalated.
About half the 4.2 million Iraqis who have fled their homes since the U.S.-led invasion remain within Iraq, while about 2 million have fled the country.
For now, northern Iraq remains calm. "People feel safe," NPA's Martinussen said. "They know Turkey is very concerned about the PKK but this is not new. It's been going on for the last 15 years. This time, of course, it's on a far bigger scale and there's more publicity."
(Additional reporting by Michael Holden in Iraq)
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