Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari vowed on Tuesday to help Turkey crack down on the banned Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) taking refuge in northern Iraq.
After talks with his Turkish counterpart Ali Babacan, Zebari told reporters in a joint news conference that his government would "actively help Turkey overcome this menace."
"We have a common position to fight terrorism wherever it is, we will not allow any party or any group, including the PKK, to poison our bilateral relations," Zebari said.
For his part, Babacan said that his country has historical relations with Iraq, but "the situation in northern Iraq, especially, the existence of the PKK" was unfortunate.
The Turkish top diplomat said the PKK have killed thousands of people and "only during one month they killed 42 people."
Babacan also said that his country rejected the conditional ceasefire offered by the PKK on Monday, underlining that Ankara did not deal with a "terror" group.
"This issue of ceasefire is an issue between two countries and two armies and not with a terror organization. The issue is of terrorism," he said.
However, Babacan expressed his keenness that his country does not want to "sacrifice its cultural and economic relations with Iraq for the sake of a terror organization."
Babacan is also scheduled to meet the Iraqi Kurdish President Jalal Talabani and prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The PKK said late on Monday that its group would observe a unilateral ceasefire with the Turkish troops on the Iraq-Turkey borders as of Monday evening.
But Abdul Rahman al-jadarje, in charge of the PKK foreign affairs, conditioned the ceasefire with the response from the Turkish side, saying, "The ceasefire will be an open-ended one as long as Turkish troops exercise restraint. If they attack us, then we will defend ourselves."
Last week, the Turkish parliament approved a motion submitted by the Turkish government for military incursion into neighboring Iraq to crack down on elements of the PKK based there.
(Xinhua News Agency October 24, 2007)
