Turks keeping troops in Iraqi camp, Baghdad turns to UN

A row over the deployment has soured relations between Ankara and Baghdad, which denies having agreed to it. Ankara says the troops were sent as part of an international mission to train and equip Iraqi forces to fight Islamic State.

The latest comments indicated continuing tensions despite the Turkish prime minister's office saying agreement was reached in talks with Iraq to deepen security cooperation and "reorganize" military personnel at the Bashiqa camp.

"There is no way we can withdraw our soldiers from northern Iraq now," Erdogan told a news conference. "There was a deployment, not for combat, but to protect soldiers providing training there."

"We will continue the training process decisively," he said.

Turkish military are helping to train local Iraqi volunteers and Kurdish peshmerga who are preparing for a long-anticipated offensive to retake Mosul, a major northern city seized by Islamic state over a year ago.

In Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi instructed his foreign ministry to lodge a formal complaint at the UN Security Council over the presence of the Turkish forces, asking it to order Turkey to withdraw its troops from Iraq immediately.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who is president of the Security Council for December, said Iraqi Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim delivered a letter on December 11, but no request had been made for a council meeting on the issue.

Power told reporters that the United States "urged that the dialogue continue between the Iraqi and Turkish governments to find an amicable way out of this difficult situation."

Earlier, Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged the government to show "no tolerance" for any infringement of the country's sovereignty. Sistani's spokesman, Sheikh Abdul Mehdi Karbala'i, did not explicitly name Turkey.