ALLIANCE COMPLICATIONS. Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and when I heard that their air force had bombed some terrorist bases in Iraq, I suspected that their air force had access codes the Israelis were not given in Desert Storm. Yep.

U.S. military personnel have set up a center for sharing intelligence in Ankara, the Turkish capital, providing imagery and other immediate information gathered from U.S aircraft and unmanned drones flying over the separatists' mountain redoubts, the officials said. A senior administration official said the goal of the U.S. program is to identify the movements and activities of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which is fighting to create an autonomous enclave in Turkey.

The United States is "essentially handing them their targets," one U.S. military official said. The Turkish military then decides whether or not to act on the information, and notifies the United States, the official said.

Nothing is going to fly without our Air Force noticing. As the PKK are a holdover communist organization, there's probably little remorse over having an ally hammer them. But it's causing some troubles with another ally.

Sunday's airstrikes provoked outrage in Baghdad, particularly among Kurdish members of the country's leadership. Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish regional government, which administers three northern Iraqi provinces, called the attack "a violation of Iraq's sovereignty." He blamed the U.S. military, which controls Iraqi airspace, for allowing Turkish warplanes to cross the border. The Iraqi parliament also condemned the attacks yesterday.

The American role in aiding Turkey, a NATO ally, could complicate U.S. diplomatic initiatives in Iraq, particularly efforts to push Iraqi political leaders to enact legislation aimed at promoting political reconciliation.

The cooperation with Turkey also places the United States in the position of aiding a country that refused to allow U.S. forces to use its territory to open a northern front against the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003. It also alienates Iraq's Kurdish minority, whose leaders strongly support the U.S. troop presence in Iraq.

First the good news ... the U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein. Now the bad news ... the U.S. has a treaty with Turkey.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates earlier stated that a dearth of "actionable intelligence" was preventing more aggressive actions against the separatists, and senior military officials acknowledged that the PKK, labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, had not been not a priority for the U.S. military in Iraq as it grappled with a persistent insurgency and sectarian fighting.

"We want to help the Turks with the PKK," Gates said in October. "If we were to come up with specific information, that we and the Iraqis would be prepared to do the appropriate thing and . . . provide that information," he said. Until now, however, officials had not provided details of the intelligence provided or how it was gathered. The officials, citing the sensitivity of the subject, spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

Deeper in the article, there's evidence that some government officials in the Kurdish Autonomous Region do not want the PKK muddling things. Busy times for the diplomats.