Speaking during a stormy parliamentary debate on the turmoil in Iraq, Gul said Ankara wanted good relations with the Kurds, saying that "both Kurds and Turkmen are our relatives."

He recalled an Iraqi military crackdown on a Kurdish rebellion in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War when Ankara allowed some 500,000 fleeing Iraqi Kurds to take refuge across the border in Turkey.

"In the same way, if the Turkmens come under oppression... undoubtedly it is our natural right to show them attention and monitor their situation," Gul said. "This should not be seen as meddling in Iraqi internal affairs."

Turkey sees Iraq's stability and integrity as of direct importance for its own stability.

It fears that if Iraq disintegrates, the Iraqi Kurds would declare independence in the north, fanning separatism in adjoining southeast Turkey, where a 22-year Kurdish rebellion has already claimed more than 37,000 lives.

"The issue of Iraq's integrity has become an issue of Turkey's integrity... If Iraq breaks up, Turkey will break up," the head of the opposition center-right Motherland Party, Erkan Mumcu, said at the debate.

Turkish leaders have recently hardened their tone towards the Iraqi Kurds, whom they suspect of designs to break away from Baghdad.

At the core of Ankara's fears is the future of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which has a volatile ethnic mix of Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs and which the Kurds want to incorporate into their autonomous region in the north.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last week that ethnic tensions in Kirkuk would only flare up if a referendum to determine the city's status, planned for 2007, is held despite what he described as Kurdish moves to upset its demographic composition.

Turkey accuses the Iraqi Kurds of having moved thousands of their people to Kirkuk and its environs since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 in a bid to change its demographic structure in their favour ahead of the referendum.

Turkey is also frustrated by US and Iraqi reluctance to move against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a separatist group that has led the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and whose militants have long found a safe haven in northern Iraq.

Ankara has threatened a cross-border military operation to crack down on the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by both Turkey and the United States, if Washington and Iraqi forces fail to act against the groups.

The Turkish army has conducted such incursions prior to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but Washington has warned its NATO ally that any such move now would be "unwise."

The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) lashed out at the government for bowing down to US opposition and called for the dispatch of Turkish soldiers into northern Iraq.

"Are we going to forfeit our security so as not to upset others?" senior CHP deputy Onur Oymen said at the debate.