Anti-Baghdad Talks Shunned by Top Kurd
The most powerful Kurdish chieftain in northern Iraq, Massoud Barzani, refused the Bush administration's invitation to attend the meeting of Iraqi opposition figures at the White House last week, Kurdish and administration officials said today.

The absence of Mr. Barzani, whose father, Mustafa Barzani, led the largest Kurdish rebellion of the last century and died in exile in the United States, was a blow to Bush administration officials who had orchestrated the meeting in part to demonstrate that Iraqi opposition forces were unified behind a new campaign to oust Saddam Hussein.


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/15/international/middleeast/15IRAQ.htmlIn a feverish effort to entice Mr. Barzani to leave northern Iraq and travel to Washington, the administration offered to send a private airplane to southeastern Turkey to pick him up, according to Kurdish and American officials.

In an additional inducement, American officials said that if Mr. Barzani would travel with his longtime rival, Jalal Talabani, on an American aircraft, it was likely the two Kurdish leaders would be treated to a meeting with President Bush. In the end, Mr. Talabani came by himself and the conference was hosted by Vice President Dick Cheney on video link from Wyoming. The explanation given for Mr. Barzani's refusal to attend involved both logistical problems and a response to broken American promises.

Mr. Barzani's decision to stay in Iraq indicates that a crisis may be looming with Turkey, administration officials said. Turkish officials have warned that they are prepared to go to war to prevent the Iraqi Kurds from declaring a kind of mini-Kurdish state within Iraq.

The Turkish government fears that such a state with control over key oil resources around Kirkuk might incite Turkey's repressed Kurdish population to rebel.

Mr. Barzani sent a representative to Washington to tell the Bush administration that it had failed to follow up on promises made last April when Mr. Barzani was spirited into the United States on a Central Intelligence Agency flight for a meeting with top C.I.A., Pentagon and State Department officials.

The officials had been courting Mr. Barzani for months in hopes of recruiting 70,000 Kurdish fighters under his control and that of Mr. Talabani, for any military assault on Iraq.

Chief among the broken promises, he said, was Washington's failure to address the possibility that Mr. Hussein might launch a pre-emptive strike on the Kurds before the administration had built up its forces in the region.

On Saturday, Mr. Cheney reiterated that if Iraq attacked the Kurds, the United States would respond at a time and place of its choosing, according to administration officials and opposition leaders. The Kurds want a more immediate response to protect the three million civilians in their towns and villages.