DIYARBAKIR, Turkey -- Authorities in southeastern Turkey have started preparations to accommodate refugees from neighboring Iraq if the United States launches an offensive against Baghdad, officials said Tuesday.

A camp of 200 tents has already been raised in a border area between the towns of Sirnak and Hakkari, an administrative official from Diyarbakir, the central city in Turkey's southeastern region, told AFP.

In consultation with Kurdish groups controlling northern Iraq, Turkish officials have also drawn up plans to build four camps inside Iraq along the border and one in Diyarbakir if a possible U.S. strike against Baghdad triggered a refugee influx, the official said.

The camps can accommodate at least 2,000 families each.

A Turkish Red Crescent office in the region has also stocked up on tents, the official said.

Turkey was caught largely unprepared after the 1991 Persian Gulf War when some 500,000 Iraqi Kurds flooded across the border to escape an Iraqi military crackdown on a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq.

_____ About One million others fled to Iran.

Sirnak Governor Huseyin Baskaya told AFP last month that the authorities had learnt their lesson from the 1991 war and that the border regions were now prepared for refugees.

Both Iraq's north and the adjacent southeastern part of Turkey have overwhelmingly Kurdish populations.

Two rival Kurdish factions, part of the Iraqi opposition whose support the Washington is seeking in its plan to topple President Saddam Hussein, have run northern Iraq since the Persian Gulf War, outside Baghdad's control and under the protection of a U.S.-patrolled no-fly zone.

NATO ally Turkey is home to a U.S. base used during the Persian Gulf War and to enforce the no-fly zone over northern Iraq.

But Ankara is opposed to any U.S. military strike against Baghdad, fearing it could exacerbate Turkey's economic problems and result in the establishment of an independent state by the Kurds in northern Iraq, which in turn, could incite Turkey's own Kurds.