ISTANBUL, 13 April 2003 — Turkey, jittery over the Kurdish seizure of key oil cities in northern Iraq, said yesterday it saw no reason to send its troops to the region for the moment, but that the army remained on standby.

“There is no need for the Turkish army to enter northern Iraq at the moment,” Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters in Ankara, but added: “We are ready” to intervene if necessary.

Turkey had threatened to take action if the Iraqi Kurds were to seize the strategic oil towns of both Kirkuk and Mosul, moves it defined as crossing its “red lines” on Iraq.

Instead it sent military observers across the border Friday in an agreement with the United States after US-backed Kurdish fighters seized the two cities.

Washington is keen to keep Turkish troops out of the region — much of which has been outside the control of Baghdad since the 1991 Gulf War — fearing clashes between the Turkish army and Kurdish groups, both US allies.

“We have intelligence teams on the ground working with the Americans keeping us informed,” Gul said.

Kurdish fighters were withdrawing yesterday from Kirkuk, said a commander from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two Kurdish groups in the area.

Ankara fears that taking control of oil resources could embolden Iraqi Kurds to move toward independence, a prospect that could rekindle a separatist rebellion in its own sizeable Kurdish minority in adjoining southeastern Turkey.

Gul also said that Kurds were withdrawing from Kirkuk and Mosul.

“All we are concerned with is that there is not a massacre,” Gul said of the widespread looting and lawlessness gripping Iraq since the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime on Wednesday.

He said such anarchy was “normal” given the lack of authority in Iraq, where US-led forces launched a war against Saddam’s regime more than three weeks ago.

And Gul denied rumors of killings of Iraqi Turkmens in Kirkuk by Kurdish fighters.

A leader of the Iraqi Turkmens, who have ethnic bonds with Turkey, on Friday accused Kurds of murder and looting in Kirkuk but a Kurdish official said the charges were aimed at triggering a Turkish military intervention against them.

Turkey already has several thousand troops in northern Iraq, left over from cross-border operations against Turkish Kurdish rebels based in the region.

Commentators in Turkey had accused the United States of breaking its promises to Ankara that it would not allow the Kurds to take Kirkuk and Mosul, warning of a rift with its key NATO ally.

Historically a Kurdish-majority city, Kirkuk was “ethnically cleansed” under the rule of Saddam, whose forces expelled many of its original inhabitants and replaced them by Arabs.

Mosul is an Arab-majority enclave of 1.5 million inhabitants in the mostly Kurdish north and surrounded by oil fields.