"You will not find a single episode in history when the Persians (Iranians) have cooperated with the Arabs against the Zionists", Ramadan, who, as a Kurd is not Arab, said Saturday night, while meeting a group of Jordanian trade unionists visiting Baghdad.

"At every stage of the conflict between the (Arab) or Muslim nation and the Zionists, the Persians have been the allies of the Zionists", Mr. Ramadan said, adding: "The designs of the Persians in the Arab world are no less than those of the Zionists, but despite that this country (Iran) remains our neighbour and we have to work towards normalising our relations".

Iran and Iraq, two Muslim nations where the Shi’a branch of Islam dominates, fought a ruinous war that lasted eight years, from 1980 to 1988.

This is the second time in the last week that senior Iraqi officials speaks out their hating of Iranians, as same kind of accusations had been made earlier by Mr. Oday Hoseyn, Saddam’s elder son.

Asked if he foresaw an alliance between Iraq, Syria and Iran against US threats to oust the Baghdad regime, Mr. Ramazan said: "Some people talk about an alliance as if Iran had proposed the idea and was waiting only for us to say yes," the vice president went on. "We should not fool ourselves when talking about such an alliance."

He also recalled that Tehran had refused to return planes, which Iraq sent to Iran to spare them damage during the 1991 Gulf war.

Iraq seeks the return of 113 military aircraft and 33 civilian planes, but Iran says it received only 22 Iraqi aircrafts, most of them damaged of crash landing.

Ramadan also accused Iran of encouraging an uprising by Shiites in southern Iraq at the end of the Gulf war.

"The damage sustained by Iraqi towns because of their behaviour was more severe than that inflicted by the missiles and bombs the American planes dropped during the attack," he said.

The two neighbours have yet to sign a formal peace treaty 14 years after the end of their devastating conflict, which cost around one million lives.

Turkish Foreign Minister Sukru Sina Gurel rejected a military option for the change of government in Iraq, saying that the crisis has to be settled peacefully.

"Any change in the Iraqi government must come from the people of that country", he said in a meeting with his Iranian counterpart Kamal Kharrazi.

Gurel's statements were echoed by Kharrazi who called for consultations among regional countries on the issue to prevent a "major regional crisis", the official Iranian news agency IRNA said on the Sunday meeting between the two ministers.