Kurdistan Observer

Turkey is threatening to ban unofficial cross-border diesel fuel imports from Iraq, in a move designed to put pressure on an Iraqi Kurdish faction that it accuses of supporting anti-Turkish militants.

Tunca Toskay, the Turkish minister of state, announced this week that the cabinet planned to ban from next month the imports, which are trucked from central Iraq through the area of northern Iraq controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP).

The dispute could be a complicating factor for the US, which needs the co-operation of both the Kurds and Turkey in its campaign to overthrow the Iraqi regime.

Political sources in Ankara said the move was a result of Turkish armed forces' discontent at the KDP's alleged support for anti-Turkish Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) militants operating out of northern Iraq.

But according to Kurdish officials, the ban reflects Turkish anxieties about a possible US attack on Iraq and suspicion of Kurdish intentions in a post-Saddam Hussein era. Turkey fears that a federal state in Iraq would encourage the yearnings for independence of its own Kurdish minority.

More than 500 trucks have been carrying diesel fuel every day from Iraq to Turkey in recent years. The trade, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is outside the United Nations-approved oil-for-food programme, the exemption from sanctions on Iraq.

But the UN and the US have turned a blind eye to the flow of diesel because it helps the Turkish economy and provides the only source of cash revenues to the Iraqi Kurds.

Although the Baghdad regime receives the bulk of the income, the KDP, the largest of two Kurdish factions, levies taxes on the trade.

The tensions between Turkey and the KDP have already significantly reduced the fuel trade over the past six months.

"The Turks are paranoid about the prospect of regime change in Iraq and they cannot oppose it, but they believe we have established a viable self-rule entity and they see the possibility of the emergence of a Kurdish state," said Hoshyar Zebari, a senior KDP official.

"We're trying very hard to convince them that we can't afford to have a Kurdish state but they confuse the idea of independence with the idea of federalism."

Turkey is believed to be most concerned about the future status of Kirkuk, the oil-rich city in northern Iraq that remains under the control of the central government.

Ankara fears that Kurdish control over Kirkuk in any future redrawing of boundaries would reinforce the capacity of the Kurds to declare an independent state.