TEHRAN, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Mohsen Aminzadeh has delivered a message from President Mohammed Khatami to his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the official Iranian news agency reported Wednesday.
Although the Islamic Republic News Agency did not disclose the contents of the message, it said both Iran and Turkey want "the territorial integrity of Iraq to be protected."
Iran has been consulting its neighboring countries since U.S. President George Bush's Jan. 29 speech in which he defined Iran, Iraq and North Korea as "an axis of evil."
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians protested against Bush's speech earlier this month, accusing him of imposing his world views on other nations.
Both Iran and Turkey border Iraq and have expressed concern over media reports that the United States was contemplating military strikes to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Aminzadeh also met Turkey's Foreign Minister Ismail Cem and discussed "matters of mutual interest," the report said.
Turkey and Iran, however, have little in common except a shared concern about the consequences of possible U.S. military strikes against Iraq.
Turkey is a close U.S. ally and the only Muslim member of NATO. Iran has no diplomatic ties with Washington and relations between Iran and the United States, that showed some signs of improvement after Sept. 11, have deteriorated rapidly since President Bush's "axis of evil" speech.
Like Iraq, Turkey and Iran both have a sizeable Kurdish minority and fear that if a military against Iraq led to the creation of an independent Kurdish state, it will have adverse effects on their own Kurdish populations.
Turkey also is a major trading partner of oil-rich Iraq.
Iraq and Iran are old adversaries who fought a eight-year war in the 1980s, in which more than a million people were killed. But the perceived U.S. threat has brought them somewhat closer and both have pledged to help each other if attacked.
