What’s more, PKK’s bases in Northern Iraq and terrorist attacks targeting Turkey from those bases pose a serious security problem for Turkey. However, the reconstruction of the state authority ruined in Iraq and efforts of integrating the national economy to the world create developments that used to be impossible at the time of Saddam Hussein. Iraq’s efforts to have good relations with the regional countries come first as one of those developments. When we look at the matter from the point of view concerning Turkey-Iraq relations, it may be seen that the relations have reached an important point in the last two years.
The most distinguishing mark in the development of relations is the establishment of the High Level Strategic Cooperation Council signed between Turkey and Iraq in July 2008. At the council presided by the Prime Ministers of both countries and coordinated by the foreign ministers, strategic issues such as energy, security and water are discussed besides politics and economy. Within this framework, it was announced that the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Iraq in October. Therefore, Davutoğlu’s visit probably aims to carry out the necessary works before the Prime Minister Erdoğan’s visit and to provide improvement in four main areas.
The first area is the Triple Mechanism brought into force in order to produce concrete results within the scope of the fight against the PKK terrorist group. The last meeting of the Triple Mechanism was held in Istanbul at the end of July. The efforts of eliminating the PKK from the north of Iraq including the evacuation of the Mahmur camp were discussed in this meeting. The Kurdish Regional Government in Northern Iraq is tried to be encouraged to spend more effort so that this attempt can be productive.
The second area is the reinforcement of the economic relations between Turkey and Iraq as well as the development of the cooperation on energy within this framework. Turkey’s role in the transport of Iraqi gas to the world will be extremely important since the gas is expected to gain more importance in the future thanks to the Nabucco Project. In addition to this, Turkey may play a more active role in oil exploration and drilling works in Iraq. The third area of the visit is probably related to the political developments in Iraq.
The Iraqi general election to be held in 2010 constitutes the political agenda of Iraq. The formation of sectarian and ethnic coalitions in the pre-election period may jeopardize the election results and stability in the country. That’s why Turkey counsels the political groups in Iraq to stay away from the political coalitions that may cause instability for some time now. Especially in the last ten days, many political authorities and leaders have come from Iraq to Turkey. It can be said that those visits are the indication of the importance given to Turkey’s opinions by different political groups in Iraq before the election. The forth area of the visit and the relations is the creation of a new relationship model in the Middle East. This relationship model is the formation of a sort of strategic relation by emphasizing cooperation on and integration in various fields rather than posing the potential problems between two countries as an obstacle before the development of relations. The success of this lately popular model will affect not only Turkey’s relations with Iraq but also with other regional countries.
* Assist. Prof. Dr. Serhat Erkmen, Ahi Evran University, Department for International Relations, ORSAM Middle East Advisor
