ANKARA, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Iran’s foreign minister warned Arab neighbours on Thursday not to put themselves in a “dangerous position” by allying themselves too closely with Washington in the escalating row over Tehran’s nuclear activity.

Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, used for a third of the world’s seaborne oil trade, if pending Western moves to ban Iranian crude exports cripple its lifeblood energy sector, fanning fears of a descent into wider Middle East war.

Tehran, which denies suspicions it is seeking nuclear weapons, was riled earlier this week when Saudi Arabia asserted it could swiftly raise oil output for key customers if needed, a scenario that could transpire if Iranian exports were embargoed.

“We want peace and tranquility in the region. But some of the countries in our region, they want to direct other countries 12,000 miles away from this region,” Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in English during a visit to Turkey.

The remark was an apparent reference to the alliance of Iran’s Arab neighbours with the United States, which has a huge fleet in the Gulf and says it will keep the waterway open.

“I am calling to all countries in the region, please don’t let yourselves be dragged into a dangerous position,” he told Turkey’s NTV broadcaster.

Salehi added the United States should make clear that it was open for negotiations with Tehran without conditions. He referred to a letter Iran says it received from U.S. President Barack Obama about the situation in the Straight of Hormuz, the contents of which have not been made public.

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Friday promised a full investigation into airstrikes on the Iraqi border that killed 35 villagers whom the military had mistaken for Kurdish militants – an attack that has infuriated minority Kurds in Turkey and Iraq.

The strikes sparked clashes on Friday in Turkey’s restive mainly Kurdish southeast and in the autonomous Kurdish northern Iraq region.

In the border village of Gulyazi, thousands of mourners attended funerals after digging deep graves along a steep cliff. The bodies, most of them young villagers who were smuggling cigarettes and diesel, were ferried on tractors or wrapped in carpets lashed to donkeys making their way along snowed tracks.

Breaking his silence over an attack Turkey’s largest pro-Kurdish party has labeled a crime against humanity, Erdogan said video recordings of the air raid would be examined and forensic experts would be dispatched to the area.

“All necessary steps will be taken,” Erdogan told reporters, calling the incident, one of the largest single-day civilian deaths in a decades-long conflict, unfortunate and saddening.

But Erdogan also defended the Turkish military, which has been fighting Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) armed militants since the group took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984.

The military had said its warplanes launched air strikes after drones spotted what looked like suspected PKK militants.

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish rights groups called on Friday for a U.N.-sponsored investigation after Turkish warplanes killed 35 villagers in an airstrike targeting Kurdish rebels on the Iraqi border that the government has called an operational mistake.

The incident, which is under government investigation, has raised tensions with minority Kurds in Turkey, sparking clashes between stone-throwing protesters and police in cities in the restive mainly pro-Kurdish southeast and areas in Istanbul.

The attack, one of the largest single-day civilian death tolls since the militants launched their armed insurgency in 1984, came at a time when Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has been trying to engage Kurds in talks to write a new constitution expected to address long-held Kurdish grievances.

“The incident requires a more detailed investigation, but it is an execution without due process, and carries the characteristics of a mass murder in terms of the number of victims,” human rights groups IHD and Mazlumder said in a preliminary report into Wednesday’s airstrike.

“Turkish and international non-governmental organizations should investigate the incident and the U.N. Human Rights Committee should send a committee right away.”

Erdogan’s government, which has admitted that those killed were civilian smugglers whom the military mistook for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, has promised not to allow a cover-up of the incident.

“We are waiting for the investigation results. We will share its results with the public,” Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told reporters on Friday.

PARIS/ANKARA (Reuters) – France sparked a diplomatic row with Turkey on Thursday by taking steps to criminalize the denial of genocide, including the 1915 mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, prompting Ankara to cancel all economic, political and military meetings.

Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly – the lower house of parliament – voted overwhelmingly in favour of a draft law outlawing genocide denial, which will be debated next year in the Senate.

French Foreign Affairs Minister Alain Juppe, speaking to journalists after the vote, urged Turkey not to overreact to the assembly decision, called for “good sense and moderation.”

But Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily criticized France for passing the draft legislation, which touches on a highly controversial period in his country’s history.

The bill, put forward by members of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling party, was “politics based on racism, discrimination, xenophobia,” Erdogan told journalists.

He said Sarkozy, was sacrificing good ties “for the sake of political calculations,” suggesting the president was tying to win the votes of ethnic Armenians in France in an election next year.

Erdogan said Turkey was cancelling all economic, political and military meetings with its NATO partner and said it would cancel permission for French military planes to land, and warships to dock, in Turkey.

PARIS/ANKARA (Reuters) – France sparked a major diplomatic row with Turkey on Thursday by taking steps to criminalize the denial of genocide, including the 1915 mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, prompting Ankara to cancel all economic, political and military meetings.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the draft law put forward by members of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling party was “politics based on racism, discrimination, xenophobia.”

“This is using Turkophobia and Islamophobia to gain votes, and it raises concerns regarding these issues not only in France but all Europe,” he told a news conference, adding that Turkey could “not remain silent in the face of this.”

France had opened wounds with Turkey that would be difficult to mend, he said, adding that Sarkozy, who faces a tough reelection battle in April, was sacrificing good ties “for the sake of political calculations.”

Erdogan said Turkey was cancelling all economic, political and military meetings with its NATO partner and said it would cancel permission for French military planes to land, and warships to dock, in Turkey.

Earlier in the day, Turkish officials told Reuters their ambassador in Paris had been recalled for consultations.

Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly — the lower house of parliament — voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill, which will be debated next year in the Senate.

ANKARA, Dec 16 (Reuters) – Turkey said on Friday that Syria would lose more than $100 million a year in transport revenues as Ankara finds alternative routes to export goods to the Middle East and Gulf.

Turkey is still trading with its neighbour but has sought new trade routes to the Middle East since relations with Damascus worsened.

They broke down following Ankara’s increased criticism of President Bashar al-Assad over his crackdown on a popular uprising that began in March.

“It will be Syria who loses in this process of introducing alternative trade routes,” the Turkish Economy Ministry said in a statement.

It said it had finalised talks to start exporting goods to Egypt via sea in January and from there overland to the Gulf.

Turkish trucks will go by ship to Egypt and use its Nuweiba port to trade with Jordan and Safaga port to trade with Saudi Arabia. Turkey said it was also studying other routes.

“After alternative trade routes start operating, Syria’s loss in transportation revenues will be over $100 million per year.”

ANTAKYA, Turkey (Reuters) – Ayham Kurdi refused to open fire on unarmed protesters and is now an enemy of the Syrian state.

A captain in President Bashar al-Assad’s army, Kurdi, 30, a soft-spoken man with a trimmed black moustache, deserted his post in June and fled to neighboring Turkey with his family.

He is now a member of the Free Syrian Army, a loose collection of deserters who are fighting to topple Assad.

Other Free Army officers have taken refuge in Turkey as well, including the group’s most senior commander, from where they communicate and coordinate operations with rebel units inside Syria.

“I left because of the massacres of civilians in Syria. Every day the regime is killing up to 30 people in Homs and sending tanks to the streets,” he said, referring to the city that has become the focus of protests against Assad.

Speaking to Reuters over thick dark coffee in the house of a Syrian émigré in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, Kurdi said the Free Army needed more weapons and equipment, and that foreign intervention might be needed to prevent Syria from descending into civil war or a drawn-out conflict.

FOREIGN INTERVENTION

GUVECCI, Turkey (Reuters) – Tracks used for decades to smuggle animals and petrol across the border between Turkey and Syria are becoming more hazardous by the day and people making the crossing now face mortal danger.

And it’s not just those on foot who are at risk. Lorry drivers who have returned from Syria talk of dead bodies by the roadside and burned-out military vehicles.

Syrian troops guarding the border are opening fire at “anything that moves”, residents and refugees said, apparently fearing armed infiltrators will cross into Syria to join the fight against President Bashar al-Assad.

“We hear gunshots at night and during the day,” said a Syrian who had taken shelter in the village of Guvecci, close to the border in Turkey’s Hatay province.

“Yesterday two men who crossed the Syrian border were shot, one in the face and the other in the arm. They were taken to Turkish hospitals,” said the man who declined to be named.

Residents and refugees from Syria sheltering with local families said smuggling back and forth through the wooded hills was continuing, but they said they had not seen any armed men infiltrating into Syria from Turkey.

Turkey long courted Assad after he came to power in 2000, but it is now calling for him to step down, giving refuge to Syrian army defectors and hosting Syria’s opposition movement.

ANKARA, Nov 15 (Reuters) – European Union candidate Turkey needs to change its attitude to media freedom and laws under which more than 50 Turkish journalists languish in Turkish jails, the head of the Council of Europe human rights body said on Tuesday.

“We clearly have a situation that needs to be solved so that Turkey moves forward,” secretary general Thorbjorn Jagland told a group of foreign journalists in Ankara during a visit.

Jagland said Turkey had some 16,000 cases pending in the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights, of which about 1,000 concerned media freedom, a situation he said had “a chilling effect” on freedom of expression.

“Turkish courts and prosecutors need to have a better understanding of European standards of what journalists are allowed to write and say without being put in jail,” said Jagland, who met members of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government to discuss media freedom.

Since coming to power in 2002, Erdogan’s party has earned praise for political reforms aimed at bringing Turkey closer to European Union norms and for liberalising an economy that is now among the fastest-growing in the world.

But his government also faces accusations of trying to tame the media and smother opposition. Critics say the prime minister uses Turkey’s harsh defamation laws to intimidate journalists and counter personal criticism.

According to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, there are 57 journalists in Turkish jails although Turkish media groups put the number at nearly 70.

ERCIS, Turkey (Reuters) – Eleven-year-old Rumeysa Kalkan’s world was shattered on a sunny Sunday afternoon at 1.41 p.m.

That day, on October 23, a powerful earthquake killed nearly 600 people in eastern Turkey, devastating towns and villages and leaving tens of thousands homeless.

Rumeysa now lives with her family in a tent pitched on a windswept soccer field with other survivors, where she sometimes has nightmares in which the earth moves again and her two-year-old brother is missing in the rubble. She has to queue up in the freezing cold for soup and pasta. Her school is closed.

But in the last few days Rumeysa has begun to laugh and sing again, thanks to a group of voluntary psychologists who work with traumatized children in a tent camp on the outskirts of Ercis, the town hardest hit by the 7.2 magnitude earthquake.

“They teach us songs, we play games all day and we are having lots of fun,” said Rumeysa, a skinny, chatty girl who wears a pink coat she got at the camp.

“After the earthquake I was afraid of the dark. My little brother could sleep but my sister and I could not. I don’t have nightmares now,” she said.

Psychologists and pediatricians say the devastation caused by the earthquake, Turkey’s most powerful in a decade, has placed enormous stress on children, harming their ability to communicate and socialize.