Iraq Seeks Turkish Food, Medicine

Faced with mounting shortages, Iraq tried to blow a hole in the U.N. trade blockade Wednesday but Turkey turned down Baghdad’s request for food and medicine.

Iraq sent one of its top officials, Oil Minister Issam Abdul-Rahim Chalabi, to the Turkish border to appeal for the supplies.

“We told them Turkey would abide by the U.N. sanctions to the very last,” Turkish State Minister Isin Celebi told reporters following a four-hour meeting on the frontier with the delegation from Iraq.

Baghdad called the meeting of the Turkish-Iraqi joint economic committee to outline the hardships created by U.N. trade sanctions.

“They said they were mainly facing shortages of medicine and baby food,” Celebi said.

Western diplomats in Ankara said Baghdad was also running out of cooking oil and is particularly worried by a shortage of cigarettes for its armed forces.

Ankara has backed the U.N. embargo imposed on Baghdad for its Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait and stopped the flow of Iraqi oil through twin pipelines across Turkey to the Mediterranean.