U.S. READIES FORMATION OF KURD STATE IN NORTH IRAQ








ABU DHABI, March 4. /RIA Novosti's correspondent Igor Kuznetsov/. The United States has begun preparations for creating a Kurd state in the north of Iraq, writes a Turkish weekly magazine, the RIA Novosti correspondent reports. 


	Referring to knowledgeable military sources, the magazine writes that at the first stage of this project worth 2 billion dollars the United States will help reform militant formations of the Kurdistan Democratic Union, led by Massoud Barzani, and the Kurdistan Patriotic Union, led by Jalal Talabani, into a regular army of the future state. Kurd militants will undergo military training in Israel and the British military base in Cyprus. 


	Five military airfields will be built in the north of Iraq and American and British aircraft will as before operate from the Turkish air base Incirlic. American military missions have been opened in the towns of Zaho and Erbil, writes the weekly.


	Turkey, fearing that the future Kurd statehood will be a puppet of Washington, is against the American project. Ankara says that this American plan is designed to prevent the rapidly developing relations between Baghdad and Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Russia, as well as supply of Iraqi oil to it neighbours. 


	In September 1998 leaders of rivalling Kurd factions signed in Washington an agreement on truce and joint control of the north of Iraq. Since 1991 Iraq has not been keeping in hand three of its northern provinces, populated mostly by Kurds. 


	Kurds, believed to be descendants of the Midianites and residing in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Armenia are the largest ethnoses (approximately 20 million people) in the world without statehood.