Trade between Iran and its western neighbor Turkey will reach $15 billion this year, the state-run Press TV news channel reported, citing Bahman Hosseinpour, Iran’s ambassador to Turkey.

The value of goods and services traded between the two countries totaled $10.6 billion during the first eight months of 2011, Hosseinpour said. 

The official said that the volume of bilateral trade stood at USD10.561 billion during the first eight months of 2011 and was expected to reach USD30 billion by 2015, a Press TV correspondent reported on Saturday.

Hosseinpour stated that measures taken over the past three years to expand Iran-Turkey trade had no precedence in the past century.

He rejected the Western theory that there is rivalry between Iran and Turkey and highlighted the cooperation between the two countries in different fields.

Hosseinpour also visited Turkey's southern province of Adana on Friday.

Addressing the audience in Adana's Cukurova University, he offered Iran's condolences over the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorist attacks in the southeastern province of Hakkari that killed 24 Turkish security forces.

The Iranian envoy also condemned the West's double standards in the fight against terrorism.

“If the Western states stop their support for the PKK, there will remain no trace of the group anymore,” he added.

PKK is a separatist terrorist group that launched an armed insurgency in 1984 for a separate Kurdish homeland in Turkey's southeast.

The Turkish government says some 2,000 PKK elements are operating close to the Turkish-Iraqi border in northern Iraq.