Kuwait may take US troops

Kuwait said yesterday it would consider accepting US troops which Washington intended to deploy in Turkey after the Turkish parliament refused to allow them into the country, the Kuwaiti defence minister said.

"If they (United States) present a formal request we are willing," Defence Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Hamad al-Sabah told reporters.

"There has been no formal request. If they present a formal request it will be presented to the leadership and if they agree then there will be no problem."

Kuwait currently hosts 100,000 US troops and 20,000 US soldiers, Sheikh Jaber said. They are training for a possible war against neighbouring Iraq.

In a setback to US plans for a "northern front" against Iraq, Turkey's parliament on Saturday narrowly rejected a motion to allow as many as 62,000 US troops to be deployed in Turkey.

The move also clouded US President George W. Bush's efforts to build international support for a potential war on Iraq over Baghdad's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

The United States is consulting with Turkey on future steps after the decision, a US official said on Sunday.

A top US military official said a US presence in Turkey would give the United States an advantage but added that a war would still be successful even without a northern front.

"I don't think it's absolutely a showstopper in terms of whether you have a northern front or not," said General James L. Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and the Commander of the United States European Command.

"We're going to be successful regardless of what we're limited to," he told a news conference at EUCOM headquarters in the southwestern German town of Stuttgart.

"But to have a presence in the northern part of Iraq - we would definitely have an advantage, and they would have to pay more attention to the North."

The presence of US troops on Arab soil is a highly sensitive issue in the region.

Kuwaiti officials have blamed suspected sympathisers with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for a series of fatal attacks on American troops in the tiny Gulf Arab state.