"We just sit and wait here, for days on end," said Aslan Ozturk, who feels his livelihood is held hostage by the tense relations between Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region and the Turkish government.

"I (already) spent two nights in the pre-crossing camp, which all heavy trucks have to pass through before joining the queue," said Ozturk, who is trying to transport household goods to the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil.

Ozturk, from the southeastern Turkish town of Mardin which is home to Turks, Kurds and Arabs, has spent the last 20 years trying to feed a family which now runs to nine children.

"If the political problems between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds were to ease, obviously we'd be able to do more for our families," added the 43-year-old driver, who earns around 600 euros (900 dollars) per month.

He says he has never had anything personally against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels who are the object of an ongoing ground incursion by Turkish troops.

The Turks entered on Thursday night through a steep mountain pass around 80 kilometres (50 miles) east of Habur -- although there is no evidence of military activity here.

"They (the rebels) are in the mountains, we never see them," added Lokman Alkan, also stuck in the two-kilometre queue, which he blamed largely on the customs bureaucracy on the Turkish side.

Despite its complete renovation in 2006, a single road-crossing for goods is totally insufficient to meet the rapidly-expanding needs of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The region has enjoyed something of a boom thanks to being largely untroubled by the sectarian violence that has gripped much of Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003.

Traders have long sought a second road customs point between Turkey and Iraq, but have been frustrated by political and military tensions between Ankara, Baghdad and Arbil, the seat of Iraqi Kurdistan's regional government.

Ankara accuses the Iraqi Kurdish authorities of, at worst providing safe have for their PKK "cousins", and at best not doing enough to clamp down on their activities.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist group by much of the international community for having waged a bloody campaign for self-rule in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey since 1984 that has claimed more than 37,000 lives.

Turks are also fearful of the autonomy the northern Iraqi Kurdish region enjoys with its own flag, institutions and even oil exploitation contracts with overseas companies.

A fully independent Kurdistan state in Iraq would only fuel separatist sentiment in Turkey's own Kurdish population, they fear.

The truckers recall another casualty of the recent tensions -- the healthy trade in domestic heating oil which flourished between the first and second Gulf wars.

Turkish lorries would exchange vital everyday supplies brought into northern Iraq for the valuable household energy source, which they sold on back home at a tidy profit.

Dozens of these trucks lie abandoned today along the sides of the main road towards the border.