U.S. officials discuss aid to Turkey for war costs

"We made some good progress in establishing an overall structure providing the flexibility and adaptability that is needed to provide confidence and security to markets," Taylor told reporters after meeting foreign ministry officials.
Asked about Turkish press reports that Turkey’s losses in the event of a war might exceed $20 billion, Taylor declined to go into detail.
"We focused on trying to make our assistance as effective and flexible as possible so the overall magnitude was not what we focused on," he said.
Turkish leader Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that Turkey would make no concrete promises of support for a U.S. war on Iraq until initial results of United Nations weapons inspections were known at the end of January. Turkey’s cabinet discussed Iraq earlier this week without any firm decision and the influential National Security Council (MGK), which groups generals and elected politicians, addressed the issue at a meeting on Friday afternoon.
The MGK said in a statement after the meeting that it was important to continue "the necessary efforts for the solution of the problem through peaceful means on the basis of U.N. decisions and the legitimacy of international law".
Turkey says its economy has lost billions of dollars since the 1991 Gulf War. Its southeastern neighbour, Iraq, was a major trade partner before that conflict but had U.N. trade sanctions imposed on it for invading Kuwait in 1990.