Bush targets PKK under drug law, aims sanctions

Using a U.S. anti-drug trafficking law, Bush designated the PKK subject to the sanctions, which prevent U.S. companies and individuals from engaging in trade and transactions with them.

"This action underscores the president's determination to do everything possible to pursue drug traffickers, undermine their operations and end the suffering that trade in illicit drugs inflicts on Americans and other people around the world, as well as prevent drug traffickers from supporting terrorists," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement.  Â

Turkey has stepped up military action against the PKK, which is listed as a terrorist group by much of the international community including the EU and the U.S., since December, carrying out several air strikes and a week-long ground incursion into northern Iraq in February, where it says more than 2,000 PKK separatists take refuge.

The United States has backed Turkey's military action in Iraq by providing intelligence on PKK movements there. Turkey has also revived dialogue with the Kurdish administration of northern Iraq, whom it has long accused of tolerating and even aiding the PKK, in a bid to enlist their cooperation against the PKK.

"We also now have the authority to target and designate other PKK entities and associates for narcotics activity. Before we were limited to this group's terror activities," said national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe, the AFP reported.

Bush also named Cumhur Yakut, a Turk suspected in large-scale heroin trafficking as subject to the sanctions.

The Ndrangheta group of Italy's Calabria region was also listed under the act.

Crime experts say the Italian crime group subject to the sanctions by Bush, 'Ndrangheta, overtook the Sicilian Mafia in the 1990s as Italy's largest drug trafficking group and has since spread throughout Europe and beyond, Reuters reported.

Bush named three other foreign individuals and two foreign entities as subject to the sanctions, including a faction of the Sinaloa, Mexico, drug trafficking cartel headed by the Beltran Leyva brothers. Marcos Arturo Beltran Leyva was specifically named on the White House sanctions list.

Media reports in Mexico have said a spike in drug violence in Sinaloa state this year, with some 300 people killed, could be the result a fracture between reputed cartel chief Joaquin Guzman, who is Mexico's most wanted man, and Beltran Leyva, one of his boldest operatives.

The Beltran Leyva family was widely thought to be responsible for the killing of Guzman's son in a military-style attack on May 8.

President Felipe Calderon has launched a crackdown on Mexico's drug cartels, and the effort has prompted a rash of retaliatory killings of federal police.

The others that Bush added to the sanctions list include: Haji Asad Khan Zarkari Mohammadhasni of Afghanistan, Hermagoras Gonzalez Polanco of Venezuela.

Previously there were 68 individuals and entities subject to the sanctions under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, which became law in December 1999, according to the White House.

Photo: AP