Turkey’s top military commander promised Saturday to make Iraq-based Kurdish rebels “grieve with an intensity that they cannot imagine,” while the prime minister said his nation would fight “when needed,” regardless of international pressure.

The military chief, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, said Friday that Turkey would wait until Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with President Bush in Washington on Nov. 5 before deciding on any cross-border offensive.

But Erdogan said his country could not be pinned down by dates in deciding whether to attack.

“We can’t say when or how we will do it, we will just do it,” he said.

The bellicose comments come amid an increasing nationalist fervor in Turkey, with the country’s red flag with white crescent and star – and images of modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – draped over scores of balconies, displayed in the backs of cars, and sold by vendors walking the streets.

Thousands took to the streets of several Turkish cities, condemning the PKK and pushing for action.

Some 1,000 people chanted “down with the U.S.A., down with the PKK” outside the U.S. Embassy in Ankara and said they were ready to fight the Kurdish rebels, yelling “we’re all soldiers.”

For most of the last decade, Kurdish guerrillas have staged attacks on the Turkish military from sanctuaries in Iraq’s north, where no roads cut through the dense forest and jagged peaks, some already topped with waist-deep snow.

A sharp escalation in the fighting has brought Turkey to the brink of sending troops south across the border, threatening to plunge Iraq’s only stable region into chaos and warfare. Turkey has demanded immediate action from the United States and Iraq.

Fighting here would pit two U.S. allies – Turkey, a member of NATO, and Iraq’s Kurds – against each other; threaten supply lines for U.S. troops in Iraq and, perhaps, unravel apparent progress in reducing the violence in the rest of the country.

Winter comes closer each day Turkey delays a decision on whether to invade the towering Qandil range where the separatist guerrillas hide.

But Jabar Yawar, a spokesman for Kurdistan’s Peshmerga Regional Defense Forces and a former guerrilla fighter himself – against Saddam Hussein – said Friday that disrupting the rebels’ operations in the region was not so simple.

“Do American and Iraqi forces operating in Iraq, can those forces capture the leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq? Or in Afghanistan or Pakistan?” he told The Associated Press in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniyah.

The separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, denies it has bases inside Iraq, but government officials here admit the guerillas roam freely back and forth across international borders in this mountainous region, where Baghdad exercises little or no control.

From 1979 to 1991, Yawar fought with the Peshmerga – then an insurgent group – against Saddam and Iraq’s ruling Baath Party. Periodically, Peshmerga fighters sought refuge in the mountains – near where the borders of Iran, Iraq and Turkey meet – where the PKK has recently had a major base.

“There are areas in those mountains like Siberia, where even now you can walk up to your waist in snow,” Yawar said. In this lawless border region, which stretches up to 25 miles deep into Iraqi territory, there are no roads – only forest and mountains.

“The army of Iraq under Saddam, with all its might and military forces, failed to go into this area,” Yawar said. “So how can a small Iraqi army like we have now, which cannot control its own territory against terrorists, enter into these mountains?”

Several factors could limit the scope of the fighting, which pits a few thousand PKK insurgents against Turkey’s massive and well-equipped army.

Those factors include diplomatic pressure from the U.S. and its allies; the desire of Iraqi Kurds to preserve the relative peace and prosperity they have achieved in the new Iraq; and the prospect for Turkey of fighting a guerrilla war in the winter in this beautiful and forbidding terrain.

Talks began and ended Friday in Ankara between the Turkish government and an Iraqi delegation. Their reported failure suggests that the Turks may not feel they have exhausted their military options.