ANKARA - Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a senior leader of his country's minority Kurds who have long been at odds with Turkey, said Thursday he would work to improve ties with Ankara and pledged action to purge northern Iraq of armed Turkish Kurdish rebels.
"I will struggle for the strengthening of relations between Turkey and Iraq," Talabani told the CNN Turk channel, with voice-over translation into Turkish. "I will do my best to improve ties on every level -- political, economic and commercial."
Talabani pledged to work for the opening of a second border crossing between the two neighbors in order to boost trade and the inauguration of a Turkish consulate in the northern city of Mosul.
"I will be very pleased to visit Turkey, if I am invited," he said.
Talabani also assured Ankara that Iraq would clamp down on Turkish Kurd rebels hiding in the mountains of northern Iraq, who, Ankara says, are infiltrating Turkey in increasing numbers to engage in anti-government violence.
"The Iraqi government has decided that there will be no place in Iraq for foreign armed groups," he said.
Once the rebuilding of Iraq and its security forces is completed "the decision of the Iraqi government will become applicable," he said.
Turkey's long-standing fears that the Iraqi Kurds are plotting to break away from Baghdad have long poisoned bilateral ties.
Ankara welcomed Talabani's election as president earlier this month, hoping that high-level Kurdish participation in Iraq's administration will dilute their separatist ambitions.
Keen to dispel Turkey's suspicions, Talabani told CNN Turk that the Iraqi Kurds had used their right to self-determination in favor of a "democratic, federal and united Iraq."
An independent Kurdish state on its sourthern border, Ankara fears, will set a destabilizing model for its own Kurds and trigger of new regional turmoil.
04/21/2005 16:55 GMT