Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. and Iraqi forces should capture and hand over militants from the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, to help prevent an attack by Turkey on the rebels' bases in northern Iraq, said an adviser to the Turkish prime minister.

``Our allies and neighbors should capture terrorists and hand them over to us,'' Egemen Bagis, a lawmaker who advises Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on foreign policy, said in a telephone interview today from Lisbon, where he is attending a European Union summit. ``We want the U.S. to treat the PKK as they treat al-Qaeda.''

Bagis declined to give the number or the seniority of the rebels Turkey expects U.S. and Iraqi troops to detain.

Turkey's parliament yesterday authorized the use of military force against the PKK in northern Iraq, a step that the U.S. fears may further damage Iraqi security and disrupt oil supplies. Turkey says U.S.-led forces in neighboring Iraq are failing to control about 3,500 of the militants sheltered in Iraq's north.

Bagis said a draft U.S. House resolution approved last week that labels as ``genocide'' the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks early last century couldn't have come at a worse time for Turkey's relations with the United States.

``The Armenian bill has come as the last straw to our frustration of the last five years, to the inability of our neighbor and our ally the U.S. to put an end to PKK casualties in Turkey,'' he said.

The PKK, which has fought a two-decade war of independence against Turkey at the cost of almost 40,000 lives, is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union.

Bagis declined to provide details of when the Turkish government might consider an incursion into northern Iraq.

``We're hoping that we won't have to use this authority, but if we have to we will,'' he said. The measure approved yesterday expires in a year.

Government ministers and army will draw up an ``action plan'' for a possible assault on the Iraqi Kurdish enclave at a meeting of the National Security Council on Oct. 24, the Milliyet newspaper reported without saying where it got the information.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Bentley in Ankara at mbentley3@bloomberg.net .