February 8, 2003	Saturday	Zul Hijjah 6,1423

WASHINGTON, Feb 7: Turkish troops can enter a border area of Iraq for border control and humanitarian purposes if the United States invades Iraq but Washington does not want any Turkish or Iraqi Kurdish forces in the oil city of Kirkuk, an Iraqi opposition source said on Friday.

The United States spelt out the arrangements at a meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara on Thursday between US presidential envoy for “free Iraqis” Zalmay Khalilzad, Turkish government officials and two Iraqi Kurdish leaders — Jalal Talabani and Nechervan Barzani, the source said.

“The message was that Turkish troops are going to cross the border. The Kurds were notified formally. But they are to stay in an unspecified border area and they can’t stretch down to any city,” said the source, who asked not to be named.

Khalilzad also told the Kurdish leaders that their militia forces should also keep out of cities such as Kirkuk and Mosul, the major cities on the edge of the autonomous zone the Kurds have been running in northern Iraq since 1991.

“The message to the Kurds is ‘Don’t get any ideas, don’t take Kirkuk and don’t do anything silly’,” the source said.

Kirkuk, which stands in the center of oilfields producing around 900,000 barrels a day, was once a largely Kurdish city but Kurds accuse the government of President Saddam Hussein of deliberately diluting the Kurdish proportion of the population by driving Kurds out and bringing Arabs in.

The big Kurdish parties — Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, Nechervan’s uncle — did not like Khalilzad’s proposals but they are not well-placed to oppose them, the source said.

“Some people in Kurdistan had ambitions to make Kirkuk the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds are not in a position to say yes or no but they are not happy about it. I’m sure they won’t push their luck,” he added.

The Kurds are also worried that their exclusion from military operations will be the prelude to a US order that they disband their militias, which, with air cover from US and British warplanes, have kept their enclave safe from Baghdad government forces for the past 12 years.

The Iraqi Kurds are wary of US intentions because they believe the United States has let them down twice in the past — firstly in the mid-1970s and again after the 1991 war, when they rose up to overthrow Saddam.

The source said the ostensible purpose of allowing Turkish troops into Iraq was to control the border, help manage any large-scale movement of refugees and be in place in case there is a humanitarian emergency in the area.

The Kurds are unhappy with that aspect of the plan too, because of Turkey’s long suppression of the Turkish Kurds and the widespread belief that Turkey has territorial ambitions in northern Iraq, which has a small Turkish-speaking minority.

“The Kurds deserve to be in the front rank in deciding the future of Iraq but that is counterbalanced by the fact that Turkey is a major US and NATO ally. There’s tension between two basic ideas but it can be resolved,” the source said.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that the United States will hold Iraq’s oil reserves “in trust” for the Iraqi people and that US officials are looking at various scenarios for managing the oil under US occupation.

Critics of US attack plans say they suspect that control of Iraq oil is one of the Bush administration’s motives.—Reuters