Iraq’s Neighbors Refuse to Lend Support to Creation of Independent Kurdish State : Summit: Foreign ministers of Turkey, Iran and Syria back Baghdad’s dominance over minority.

Glossing over their mutual suspicions, Turkey, Iran and Syria have closed the door to any independent Kurdish state carved from northern Iraq. But they failed to agree on how to rein in Kurdish dreams of self-rule encouraged by the Persian Gulf War.

Analysts here said Monday that a weekend foreign ministers meeting between Turkey and its neighbors was remarkable less for its agreement than for what was not said. In the aftermath, there seemed little prospect for joint action among three countries with disparate dreams for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, despite their unity in rhetoric.

“The territorial integrity of Iraq is important for all three countries. Any attempt to divide it will have negative effects on the peace and stability of the region,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Hikmet Cetin at a joint news conference in Ankara.

Thus did the big three write off political maneuvering by Iraq’s 3.5 million Kurds, who elected a Parliament last May and announced the creation of a federal state last month in areas of northern Iraq that have been under the protection of the United States and its allies since the end of the Gulf War.

“We are concerned. We want to help avoid any situation where the partition of Iraq is inevitable. As neighboring countries, we would help in stopping the process of de facto partition,” said Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh.

The United States has long shared the view of regional powers that there should be no independent nation for the 20 million Kurds, 12 million of them in Turkey and the rest scattered in Iraq, Syria, Iran and the former Soviet Union.

Official American interest in the issue runs high: U.S. warplanes are the backbone of the force that has protected the Kurds since they fled from Hussein into Iran and Turkey. Turkish newspapers reported that U.S. Ambassador Richard Barkley drove to the home of Turkish Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel to be briefed on results of the encounter while the foreign ministers were still in meetings.

Neither representatives of the Kurds nor emissaries from the Iraqi government were invited to the Ankara meeting on Iraq’s future. Moreover, the ministers dismissed the Iraqi National Congress--which unites Hussein’s major Kurdish, Shiite, Sunni and Turkmen foes and has come the closest yet to uniting the fractured Iraqi opposition.

A five-day meeting of the Congress Assembly in northern Iraq last month was “a way which might lead to dividing Iraq, which we cannot accept,” Shareh said.

Among postwar players, the one perhaps most concerned by the search for some sort of Kurdish statehood is Turkey. It is fighting an insurgency in the southeast against pan-Kurdish Marxist separatists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkish troops and tanks are now withdrawing from a monthlong incursion into northern Iraq against the guerrillas’ bases.

Turkish commentators say a meeting last week between Iraqi Kurdish leaders Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani privately agreed on a border security zone to protect Turkey from attacks by the PKK, their joint rival.

The American, British and French air umbrella protecting the Kurds against Hussein is crucial both to Kurdish safety and to political dreams in northern Iraq. The Iranians and the Syrians, by contrast, dislike the foreign presence, which the Turkish Parliament must decide in December whether to renew.

Despite their concern about Kurdish political assertiveness, the three regional powers gave no sign of any united action against it. Cooperation regarding what Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati called “the chaotic situation in northern Iraq” would be limited to political consultation, with the next meeting in February in Damascus, they said.

The potential for united action against Kurdish ambitions is limited by regional suspicions and ambitions. Turkey, Iran and Iraq denounce terrorism, but they harbor one another’s opposition groups.

The PKK, in fact, has long been trained and housed in Syrian-controlled parts of Lebanon and until recently was seen as an arm of Syrian foreign policy.

A Turkish intelligence team flew to Iran last week to check reports that PKK leaders had moved there.

The three neighbors also differ widely on their hopes for Iraq after Hussein. Syria would like to see friendly Arab Baath Socialist officers replace him. Iran wants a government favorable to Islamic fundamentalism. Turkey talks of a Western, secular future for Iraq. But like its neighbors, it sees a political future for Iraq’s Kurds only within the context of government from Baghdad.

Times special correspondent Hugh Pope in Istanbul contributed to this report.