ANKARA, Oct 20: Turkey on Sunday accused key ally Washington of backing an independent Kurdish state in neighbouring Iraq and vowed it will use military force to prevent such a move.

The row comes as the head of US forces in the Gulf is to meet with the Turkish military on Monday over battle plans for a US strike on Baghdad which Ankara fears could deepen its economic crisis and unsettle the region.

“US officials say they do not want an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq but developments there show a de facto state has been set up,” Foreign Minister Sukru Sina Gurel said in Sunday’s Milliyet newspaper.

“This raises suspicions about whether the United States is trying to provoke Ankara by supporting these developments,” Gurel said. “Proclamation of an independent Kurdish state... will meet with Turkish intervention.”

The support of both Turkey and Kurdish groups in Iraq is seen as essential to US intentions to topple President Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime,which Washington has described as an “axis of evil” along with Iran and North Korea.

Gurel said Turkey would not be prodded by “outside provocation and encouragement” into taking military action but nevertheless would do so if it sees a security threat developing.

Turkey fears the two Kurdish factions which now control northern Iraq could seek to expand their control to the Kirkuk oil-producing region, and lay the groundwork for future independence.

Ankara is concerned a breakaway Kurdish entity could rekindle separatism among its own Kurds in southeastern Turkey.

Turkey says it already has hundreds of troops in northern Iraq, which has been out of Baghdad’s control since the 1991 Gulf War and held by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

A high-ranking KDP delegation is to visit Turkey in the next few days at the invitation of the Ankara government, KDP official Hoshyar Zibari told AFP in the northern Iraqi town of Arbil.

“This visit aims to clear the tension in relations between the two parties, to examine the future of Iraq, the federal option sought by the Kurds and economic exchanges,” he said.

Zibari said the delegation would be led by the KDP’s deputy leader, Nechirvan Barzani.—AFP