"We have made it clear, obviously, we do not want to see a resort to any greater violence" in Iraq, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in describing Rice's meeting with Abdullah Gul, Turkey's deputy prime minister and foreign minister.

"Innocent Turkish citizens have lost their lives as a result of terrorist acts of the PKK," he said.

"I think Turkey as well as Iraq both have an interest in trying to resolve the issue," he said.

Turkey, a NATO member, has harshly criticised the US and Iraqi governments for inaction against the PKK, which it says uses the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq as a launchpad for attacks on Turkish territory.

Washington in August named a retired general and former NATO commander, Joseph Ralston, to coordinate efforts to counter the PKK and lessen tensions on both sides of the border.

But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month complained that Ralston had achieved nothing and suggested his apointment was "a tactic" to distract Turkey.

Erdogan, under popular pressure to order military strikes on PKK bases in Iraq, said rebel offices over the Iraq border remained open despite an announcement by Baghdad in September that they would be closed.

The US argues that it is swamped by violence in other parts of Iraq and says it is working to curb the PKK through non-military means such as cutting off its financial resources.

During a one-on-one meeting and working lunch, Rice and Gul also discussed renewed moves in the US Congress to pass a law recognizing the 1915 massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman empire as genocide, McCoramack said.

"We understand very clearly that this is a sensitive issue not only for the Turkish people but for the Armenian people," said McCormack.

A number of legislatures around the world have recognized the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in what is today Turkey as genocide.

But while US President George W. Bush commemorates the massacres each year in a speech, his administration had stopped short of backing the genocide bills.

Turkey rejects the genocide label and argues that 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife, when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with Russian troops invading the crumbling Ottoman Empire during World War I.

Gul and Rice also discussed Turkey's troubled efforts to join the European Union, the political turmoil in Lebanon and UN proposals to grant quasi-independence to the Serbian province of Kosovo, McCormack said.