Hunt for Kurds Nearly Over, Turkey Says : Military: Prime minister gives Clinton assurance about four-week incursion into Iraq. She offers no specific timetable, however.

Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey assured President Clinton on Wednesday that Turkish troops will soon end their hunt for Kurds in northern Iraq, but she offered no specific timetable, U.S. officials said.

Briefing reporters after the two leaders’ 45-minute White House meeting, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke said “military security” precluded any discussion of an exact time for withdrawal of the Turkish expedition.

A force of 35,000 Turkish troops crossed the border into northern Iraq four weeks ago to round up the leaders and destroy the bases of rebel Turkish Kurds.

“The majority of the job is over and done with,” Ciller told reporters before her meeting with Clinton.

Holbrooke said Clinton told Ciller that he attaches “high importance” to her promise that the military expedition will be “limited in scope and duration, a matter of weeks.”

“Ten percent of the troops have already withdrawn,” Holbrooke went on. “We attach high importance to that.”

He said that, while there is no doubt that Turkey has a legal right to pursue terrorists across its border, Clinton has been troubled by the possibility that the troops might harm civilians--what soldiers call “collateral damage.”

“We have repeatedly stressed . . . our deep concern about the danger of what the military euphemistically calls collateral damage and which you all understand to mean something much less attractive than that,” he said.

Holbrooke said there have been reports from journalists and American diplomats about the fighting but that the Clinton Administration does not believe that it has had what he called “significant reports” on the possible harm to civilians caught in the fighting.

“It is an issue of concern,” he said. “There’s no question about it.”

Discussing what sounded like the impending end of the campaign, Ciller told reporters: “The reason I cannot announce a date is because it would not be fair for those people (the troops) . . . searching the caves up on the mountains for guns and the ammunition that would have been used to kill the innocent people in my country.”

She evidently used the same argument with the President.

“She said very bluntly, and it seems reasonable to us,” Holbrooke said, “that you don’t announce in public the details of an ongoing military operation, which the Turkish government believes is having considerable success.”

The rebels belong to the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which wants autonomy for the 12 million Kurds in southeast Turkey--almost 20% of the Turkish population.

While Turkish troops scoured northern Iraq for the PKK bases, the Turkish military said it believes that other Turkish troops have killed rebel commander Semdin Sakik within Turkey itself, Reuters news agency reported.

Ciller said that, even while her government is battling the Turkish Kurds, its relations with Iraqi Kurds are excellent.

“In fact, the Kurdish people in northern Iraq were quite happy to see us come in,” she said, “because what had happened is that the Kurdish elements had been pushed south and had to evacuate northern Iraq because of the terrorists. Now that the terrorists have simply run away, there is the possibility of these Kurdish elements coming back to northern Iraq and settling.”

The incursion has aroused much condemnation in Europe.

Queried about this on PBS television Tuesday night, Ciller said: “This is something that hurts my people because we stood up with our allies and we were the first one to act with our allies, not only in Korea but also in the (Persian) Gulf War.”

She denounced the criticism as unfair because the fact that the terrorists have a haven in northern Iraq “is not our making.”