Iraq

Turkey won't send troops

WASHINGTON - With the quiet blessings of the White House, Turkey said Friday it was withdrawing its offer to deploy troops to help stabilize Iraq.

With the announcement, the administration's effort to solicit large numbers of foreign troops to bolster the American presence suffered another blow. India and Pakistan have declined. South Korea has said it might be willing, but is concerned about reducing its troop levels at a moment of heightened tensions with North Korea. Japan has approved sending troops for noncombat missions, but has yet to deploy them.

About 24,000 non-American troops are in Iraq, but almost half of them are British.

Turkey's decision was conveyed to the administration in a telephone call Thursday evening between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the country's foreign minister, Abdullah Gull.

In an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer, former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch accuses the military of using her capture and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war in Iraq.

Video of U.S. commandos whisking Lynch to a waiting chopper helped cement Lynch's image as a hero. But in the Primetime interview to be aired on Tuesday, Lynch told Sawyer there was no reason for her rescue to be filmed.

"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," Lynch said. "It's wrong."

And while medical records cited in the upcoming book I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story show she was raped, Lynch said she has no recollection of it.

"Even just the thinking about that, that's too painful," she said.

Dr. Mahdi Khafazji, an orthopedic surgeon at Nasiriyah's main hospital who performed surgery on Lynch to repair a fractured femur, said Friday he found no signs that she was raped.

Dr. Khafazji said Lynch was taken first to the Military Hospital, a few hundred yards from the ambush site at around 8 a.m., about an hour after the attack. A few hours later, she was brought to his hospital.

"She was injured at about 7 in the morning," he said. "What kind of animal would do it to a person suffering from multiple injuries?"

Dr. Jamal al-Saeidi, a brigadier general and head of the orthopedic department at the now disbanded Military Hospital, said Lynch was fully clothed with her field jacket buttoned up when she was brought to the hospital. "Her clothes were not torn, buttons had not come off, her pants were zipped up," al-Saeidi said.

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