Turkish PM Visits Egypt for Talks on Iraq

Mr. Gul’s Mideast tour is the first by a senior Turkish official since a new government swept to power in Ankara after November elections.
Turkey has been pressing for a diplomatic solution to the Iraqi crisis, saying war would have a devastating affect on the entire region.
Turkey, which borders Iraq, hosts U.S. military forces at its military bases, but has not said if it would allow the bases to be used to launch attacks against Iraq.
Meanwhile, United Nations arms inspectors in Iraq are carrying out their search of weapons of mass destruction. On Sunday, teams of inspectors visited a hospital in northern Iraq and the marine science department at Basra University in the far southern part of the country. U.N. experts also carried out more searches in the Baghdad area.
U.N. teams arrived in northern Iraq on Saturday to set up an office in Mosul to help them expand and accelerate inspections in the region. In another development Saturday, the U.S. military said U.S. and British coalition warplanes bombed three Iraqi air defense sites in the southern no-fly zone in response to what was described as hostile action.
The United Nations established "no-fly" zones after the Gulf war to prevent the Iraqi government from attacking minority Kurds in the north and Shi’ite Muslims in the south.