Turkey wants to prevent the city and its giant pool of underground oil from becoming an economic engine
Turkey renewed its frustration on Sunday with the Kurdish bid for domination of Iraq's oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, which lies on Iraq's volatile ethnic fault lines between Arabs and Kurds.
Mehmet Vecdi Gonul, Turkey's defense minister, said Kirkuk's future status carries major implications for Turkey and Iraq's other neighbors no matter who controls the city and its surrounding oilfields. Gonul asked the Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish-led government not to impose an "unrealistic" future on Kirkuk.
But Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, an ethnic Kurd, warned Turkey not to meddle in "our Kirkuk."
"You speak of Kirkuk as if it is a Turkish city," Zebari said told Gonul. "These are matters for Iraq to decide."
Turkey wants to prevent the city and its giant pool of underground oil from becoming an economic engine that could fund a bid by Iraqi Kurds for independence, a move would threaten to draw Turkey, with its 15 million Kurds, into a regional war.
Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Kurdish forces in northern Iraq have rallied to reverse what they claim to be an Arabization policy of Saddam Hussein, which purged Kirkuk and other oil-rich areas of Kurds and replaced them with Arab settlers.
