Ankara, Turkey ? Turkey and the United States scrapped plans to send Turkish troops to Iraq, a setback for U.S. policy after Washington failed to break resistance to the deployment from Iraq’s governing council.

Friday’s announcement deprived the United States of a much-needed foreign force to contain an increasingly violent insurgency in Iraq. The Bush administration has been pressing Turkey for months to send what would be the first major Muslim contingent of peacekeepers.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul agreed in a telephone conversation Thursday night that the offer of Turkish troops would be withdrawn, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

Without elaboration, Boucher said the “sensitivities” of the situation prompted the decision.

The Pentagon had been counting on a third multinational division, possibly led by Turkey. The Turkish parliament voted last month to allow the country’s troops to join the U.S.-led occupation of its southeastern neighbor. Turkey was expected to send some 10,000 soldiers and become the third-largest force in Iraq after Britain.

Turkish officials hoped that joining U.S.-led forces would mend strained ties with Washington after Ankara’s refusal to let American troops invade Iraq from Turkish soil in March, as well as give Turkey a chance to have a say on the future of Iraq and contain the Turkish Kurdish rebel threat from bases in northern Iraq.

Iraqis, however, strongly objected to the Turkish troops because of sensitivities to the legacy of nearly 400 years of Ottoman rule in Iraq until World War I. Turks are mostly Sunni Muslims, and their predecessors, the Ottomans, favored Iraq’s Sunnis while ruling over one of the world’s great empires.