ANKARA, July 19: The United States and Turkey are discussing ways to get rid of Kurdish militants holed up in northern Iraq as the two Nato allies try to end a diplomatic crisis over Turkey’s role in the troubled region.

US ambassador to Turkey Robert Pearson said on Saturday a visit to Ankara by Washington’s top soldiers in Iraq and Europe had bolstered their strong military ties which were severely shaken by the arrest of 11 Turkish soldiers in northern Iraq early this month.

“The two (generals) discussed with the General Staff further information about a coordinated approach to eliminating the PKK/KADEK in northern Iraq,” Pearson told reporters in Ankara after the departure of Central Command chief General John Abizaid.

Turkey has stationed thousands of its soldiers just inside Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War in a controversial deployment it says is critical to stopping hundreds of PKK and KADEK guerrillas returning to mount attacks on Turkish targets.

The soldiers’ presence has done little to defuse diplomatic tensions first sparked by Turkey’s refusal in March to allow US soldiers to invade Iraq from its southern border.

Some local newspaper reports say Turkey has struck a secret deal with the United States to withdraw its soldiers from northern Iraq, but Ankara has said that would only be possible once the mountainous area is rid of Kurdish militants.

Turkey has fought a decades-long war against the militants in the southeast of the country in which 30,000 people have died.

Pearson indicated that a European Union-inspired law currently before Turkey’s parliament, which would award a partial amnesty to Kurdish guerrillas, would be central to efforts to eradicate the militants from northern Iraq.

Abizaid was joined in Ankara by Nato commander US General James Jones for talks with Turkish generals heading the second largest standing army in Nato.

Turkey also fears that the close relations the United States enjoys with a Kurdish administration controlling northern Iraq could pave the way for the establishment of an independent Kurdish state. Turkey believes such a state would pose a threat to the Turkish Turkmen minority in Iraq, with whom Ankara has close ethnic ties.

Washington says it will not allow that to happen.

Five Kurds now sit on a US-backed 25-member council governing Iraq with US officials.

Turkey says the one seat held by the Turkmen, an ethnic group in northern Iraq of less than one million, is insufficient because they deserve special protection.—Reuters