Global Policy Forum

By Amberin Zaman

Turkey, one of Washington's most important allies against Saddam Hussein, claimed yesterday that it may have a historical stake in Iraq's northern oil fields.

Yasar Yakis, the foreign minister, said he was examining treaties from the early 20th century to see whether Turkey had a claim to the oil fields of the Mosul and Kirkuk provinces, which the Turks ruled during Ottoman times. In comments published yesterday in the Hurriyet newspaper, Mr Yakis said: "If we do have such rights, we have to explain this to the international community and our partners in order to secure those rights."

His comments will not be welcomed in the United States or the region, where there are considerable anxieties about the likely results of a war on the integrity of Iraq.

While Mr Yakis was careful to emphasise that Turkey had no territorial claims over the provinces, his comments were greeted with anger by Arab diplomats in Ankara. "He is revealing Turkey's true intentions. They are playing a dangerous game," said one senior Arab diplomat, who declined to be identified.

However, Western diplomats interpreted Mr Yakis's remarks as a further attempt to discourage the Iraqi Kurds from making a play for the provinces during an eventual war against Baghdad.

The Iraqi Kurds, who have controlled the north of the country - but not the oil fields - since the 1991 Gulf war, say that Kirkuk is historically a Kurdish city and should be the capital of the semi-independent state they are demanding in exchange for support in a war against Saddam Hussain.

Such claims have angered Turkey, which claims that Kirkuk and Mosul are dominated not by the Kurds but by an ethnic Turkish group called the Turcomans.

In recent years, Turkey has been arming and training a Turcoman faction in northern Iraq known as the Turcoman Front as its stalking horse in the Kurdish-controlled enclave.

Ankara's top generals have taken turns to threaten to invade Iraqi Kurdistan should the Kurds try to break away from Baghdad. Some 5,000 Turkish troops are already deployed in and around Iraqi Kurdish territory held by Massoud Barzani, the leader of the stronger of the two Kurdish factions controlling northern Iraq.

The troops are officially there to hunt down Kurdish separatist PKK guerrillas who fought a 15-year insurgency against Turkish troops that ended in 1999 after the capture of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

Iraq is home to the world's second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and before the 1991 Gulf war more than half of the country's oil exports were pumped through a dual pipeline running from Kirkuk to Turkey's southern Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

The pipeline was sealed in compliance with United Nations sanctions after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It was re-opened in 1996 under the UN's oil for food programme, which allows Iraq to export its oil in order to purchase humanitarian supplies.

Iraq has repeatedly accused America of wanting to seize control of its oil under the pretext of installing a democratic government in Baghdad.

Turkey's claims to Iraqi oil date back to the early 1920s when the Ottoman Empire was being carved up following its defeat by the Allies in the First World War. Under a treaty signed by the new Turkish Republic and Britain, Turkey was to receive 10 per cent of all Iraqi oil revenues for a 25-year period in exchange for renouncing its territorial claims over Mosul and Kirkuk.

That treaty was suspended in 1958 under the government of Adnan Menderes, the late Turkish premier, as a gesture of goodwill towards Iraq. But subsequent governments sought to revive the treaty.

"Such initiatives by Turkey will go nowhere," said Baskin Oran, a professor of international relations at Ankara University, who has studied the treaties.

According to Prof Oran's own estimates, Turkey is not due any more than £20 million in unpaid revenue stemming from its 1926 treaty rights.