Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül met US Secretary of State Colin Powell on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York and pressed Ankara's concerns about the future of Kirkuk, the oil-rich city in northern Iraq.
Ankara is uneasy about the prospect of Iraqi Kurds, who have served as a key US partner in Iraq, gaining control of Kirkuk, a city that also holds a large Turkmen population. Under Saddam Hussein's government, Arab families were resettled in the city over several decades; Kurdish groups have since moved to reverse those demographic changes.
Türkiye fears that Kurdish dominance over the region's oil resources could entrench an autonomous zone with ambitions to break from Baghdad, and that such a development could encourage separatist feeling among Türkiye's Kurdish population in the southeast. Gül said a stable and territorially unified Iraq was central to Türkiye's long-term interests.
A separate dispute over US military strikes near the Turkmen-majority town of Tall Afar, which had prompted Ankara to threaten a suspension of Iraq-related cooperation with Washington, was resolved earlier in the month, with both sides agreeing to assist the town's residents.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in September 2004, in its own words.