(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-01-09 07:57

The Turkish president's visit with US President George W. Bush yesterday is seen as a major sign of sharply improved relations between the NATO allies after five years of acrimony over the Iraq war and US policy on Turkey's fight against Kurdish rebels.

President Abdullah Gul's visit follows a visit by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan two months ago that resulted in a commitment by Bush to share intelligence on rebels from the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, and not to object to Turkish airstrikes against the Kurdish guerrillas' installations in northern Iraq.

The two sides have even established a coordination center in Ankara so Turks, Iraqis and Americans can share information. The first Turkish airstrike - on December 16 - used intelligence shared by Washington. Two days later, a small Turkish ground force invaded Iraqi Kurdistan to flush out Turkish Kurds sheltering there. Washington tacitly approved.

The PKK has been fighting for two decades for a Kurdish homeland in eastern Turkey.

Speaking about Turkish-US relations with Turkish reporters last month, Gul said, "Things are going well at the moment. Intelligence is being shared. Now there is a cooperation befitting our alliance. Both of us are satisfied. This is how it should be. We could have come to this point earlier."

The Turkish daily Sabah called it a "new era" in relations with the US, and the Hurriyet newspaper quoted Gul as saying that if the US helps Turkey eradicate the Kurdish rebel threat, Ankara will increase its help in Iraq tenfold.

In the months leading to Erdogan's November 5 White House appearance, however, US-Turkish relations were at their lowest point in many years. Neither side was blameless.

In 2003, during the buildup to the Iraq war, the Turkish parliament rejected US requests to send troops into Iraq through Turkish territory. And a poll last summer showed just 9 percent of Turks saw the US favorably.

The US Congress did its share to poison the atmosphere. Despite pleas from the Bush administration and personal appeals from Gul, then foreign minister, and other prominent Turks, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution last year that described as genocide the World War I-era deaths of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey reacted by withdrawing its ambassador from Washington.

Despite the greatly improved situation since the Erdogan-Bush meeting, the situation remains touchy.

"Certainly there is far greater satisfaction in Turkey than there was as late as three months ago," John Sitilides, chairman of the Southeast Europe Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said on Monday. "It's all related to the PKK. Now the US is seen not as an entity that is holding the Turkish military back but is working with Turkey."

Still, Sitilides said, Turkey could "respond recklessly" to perceived US mistreatment with grievous results. "There are 150,000 US troops on the ground in Iraq whose well-being would be jeopardized if Turkey decided on an action such as closing off access to the flow of war supplies."