THE CLINTON administration is prepared to conduct a helicopter airlift to rescue 2,000 or more Kurds and other Iraqi dissidents in northern Iraq who worked for the United States. But the refugees remain trapped because neighbouring Turkey is reluctant to let them in, senior US officials said.
Those seeking to flee Iraq are mostly encamped near the Turkish border awaiting an opportunity to cross. They do not appear to be in imminent danger, a senior US official said, because if they were they would have dispersed to the mountains.
The United States is prepared to use American helicopters based at Incirlik, Turkey, to ferry the refugees across the border, but does not yet have Turkish permission. State Department, Pentagon and White House officials all denied reports from the region that the airlift was already under way.
President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who reasserted his control over the north with a lightning military thrust in alliance with a pro-Saddam Kurdish faction last week, has branded those who worked for the US as "traitors" and their lives are in danger, administration officials said.
"We have identified several thousand people who were with us over the last five years, and these include people who have worked with us and their family members, who are at peril because of their association" with the US and its allies, the State Department spokesman, Mr Nicholas Burns, said.
The fate of the refugees could provide the first test of relations between the US and the Islam-based government of the new Prime Minister, Mr Necmettin Erbakan - the first such government in Turkey, a NATO ally, since the modern Turkish state was founded after the first World War. Washington deals with the pro-Western Foreign Minister, Ms Tansu Ciller, but she reports to Mr Erbakan.
Turkey has been a partner of the US in Operation Provide Comfort, which was established after the 1991 Gulf War. But when it comes to the Kurds, Turkey has a different set of imperatives. For years it has been plagued by an armed insurrection of its own Kurds, who live in the area bordering Iraq and are demanding regional autonomy from Ankara. The one point on which Iraq, Iran and Turkey are in complete agreement is that their Kurdish populations must not be encouraged to believe that they can gain self-government.
An adviser to President Saddam said yesterday that Turkey had assured him it would not let US aircraft strike Iraq from a base in southern Turkey.
"Turkey confirmed to us that the conditions by which the United States planes use Incirlik air base do not permit the United States to launch air strikes into Iraq," the presidential envoy, Mr Hamed Youssef Hummadi, said.