By Shamal Aqrawi

ARBIL, Iraq, Oct 27 (Reuters) - When Iraq's prime minister, under pressure from Turkey, vowed to close the offices of rebel Kurds in Iraq, Kurdish officials were bemused.

"Let the Turkish visit Kurdistan and find the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). Then we will shut their offices," Jamal Abdullah, spokesman for Kurdistan's government, told Reuters.

"There are no offices for this party because it is not recognised, so the Kurdistan government has no job to do."

With Turkey massing troops on the Iraqi border and threatening to invade to crush the PKK, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government has been keen to assure Ankara it wants good relations.

An aide to Maliki told Reuters it would be up to Iraq's largely autonomous Kurdistan region bordering Turkey to close the PKK's offices. Journalists working in Kurdistan say they are unaware of any PKK offices in the region.

Maliki said in a statement on Wednesday the PKK was "a bad terrorist organisation and we have taken a decision to close their offices and to not allow them to work on Iraqi soil".

He gave no details of where these offices were and when action would be taken to shut them down.

"The delegation heading to Turkey will discuss the mechanism of closing down PKK offices and camps in Iraq," another adviser to Maliki, Sadiq al-Rikabi, told Reuters.

The delegation returned home from Ankara on Saturday after talks to avert military action collapsed. Turkey had rejected the Iraqi proposals to deal with the PKK as insufficient.

PKK BASES BUT NO OFFICES

Kurdistan acknowledges the PKK has bases in the inaccessible Qandil mountains that it uses to launch attacks on Turkey, but it says these lie beyond the control of their Peshmerga security forces.

But politicians from Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani down are pleading ignorance of any offices.

"There are camps in the Qandil mountains, but there are no PKK offices in Iraqi Kurdistan. There used to be a PKK cultural office in Baghdad, but it was closed down last year," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Iraq's parliament.

There is speculation Maliki might have been referring to offices belonging to the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party in Arbil, Sulaimaniya, Mosul, Kirkuk and Dahuk.

The party, which shares the PKK aim of establishing an independent Kurdish state, registered to fight the national election in 2005. It won just 15,000 votes and no seats.

A visit to its office in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya on Friday found two pictures of the PKK's jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan pasted on its front door.

"We sympathise with the PKK and other Kurdish parties. We provide public support to them through the media, but we do not support them militarily," the party's head, Dr Faik Gulpi, said.

"If Maliki or anyone else tries to shut down our offices it would be an unconstitutional and illegal step."

Kurdistan government spokesman Abdullah said Kurdish authorities had no plans to take action against the party, unless evidence was produced linking it to the PKK. (Additional reporting by Sherko Raouf in Sulaimaniya and Aws Qusay and Wisam Mohammed in Baghdad)

AlertNet news is provided by