WASHINGTON — American diplomats and generals are working to stop Turkey from invading Iraq.

With Turkish forces amassed along their country’s southern border, Ankara’s top general, Yasar Buyukanit, said yesterday that his soldiers are awaiting instructions to invade Kurdish safe havens in northern Iraq. “As soldiers, we are ready,” he said at a security conference in Istanbul.

Washington is doing its best to make sure those orders are never given. “We are in close communication with the Turks, the Iraqis, and the Kurds about this,” a State Department spokesman, David Foley, told The New York Sun. “We have made clear privately and publicly for them to work to resolve this through the existing tripartite process.”

At least publicly, Turkey’s military has pinned a May 22 suicide bombing in Ankara on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a separatist group with whom the Turks have been at war for a generation. The Turks responded to the attack with border operations against suspected PKK safe havens along the Iraqi border, where Turkey, a NATO member and candidate for European Union membership, says it killed 14 members of the group on Monday in a series of raids and attacks.

On Wednesday, a Turkish prosecutor, Ismail Sari, said a Syria-bound train attacked by Kurdish guerrillas on May 25 contained weapons from Iran. The Iranian Embassy in Ankara denied the accusation.

The mounting tensions between the Kurds of Iraq and the Turkish army have been a priority for the Bush administration, which last year appointed a retired Air Force general, Joseph Ralston, as a special mediator between the Kurds and Turks specifically to deal with the PKK.

For both sides of the potential conflict, it is a difficult issue. The Kurdish press in Iraq is generally sympathetic to the plight of the Kurds in Turkey, and an offshoot of the PKK has established a safe haven in Kurdish-controlled Iraqi territory near Iran’s border. Nonetheless, the two ruling Kurdish parties in Iraq, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, have pledged to control their border with Turkey and say the PKK can be contained through political dialogue.

But the PKK is also a major political issue within Ankara. Many Turkish generals have been hostile to the ruling Justice and Development Party — the first openly Islamist party in modern Turkish history — which has maintained ties to Hamas in Gaza. Those generals may be attempting to portray the ruling party as indecisive on terrorism seven weeks ahead of national elections.

For Turkey, a military incursion into northern Iraq could jeopardize its relationship with its most powerful ally, America. The north remains the most stable part of Iraq, which has been wracked by terrorist attacks and sectarian violence.

“The Americans surely do not want their ally Turkey to destabilize the only stable part of Iraq,” a representative of the Kurdistan regional government in Washington, Qubad Talabani, said.

Both the Iraqi and Kurdistan regional authorities have condemned the bombing in Ankara, Mr. Talabani, whose father is the president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, added. “We in the Kurdistan regional government are also seeking a political solution to the issues that exist between Iraq’s Kurdistan region and Turkey. We have seen the impact of an improved economic relationship between Turkey and Iraq’s Kurdistan region. If we can improve the political relationship, rewards will be that much greater.”

President Talabani met yesterday with President Bush at the White House. After that meeting, Mr. Bush announced that he was sending his former aide, Meaghan O’Sullivan — a protégé of the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass — to Iraq to help the Iraqi government meet reconciliation benchmarks built into the temporary funding bill he signed last month to fund the military surge.

The Iraqi leader conceded that his government will face challenges in the coming months. “I don’t think that everything is okay, everything is good, we have no problems. No, we have problems,” he said. “We have serious problems with terrorism. The main enemy of Iraqi people is Al Qaeda and terrorists cooperating with them. But there are groups who are now raising arms against us, now we are negotiating with them to get them back to the political process of the Iraqi people.”