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Shared border gate will boost Turkish-Syrian economic ties
With the modernization of the border gate, which will be outfitted with new technology, officials expect to cut down waiting times, reduce long queues and simplify customs procedures in a bid to boost business ties.
The shared border gate with Syria will be the first of its kind for Turkey, according to officials from the Undersecretariat of Customs. The shared border process will require travelers to complete the declaration process while exiting from one country and to be checked and searched while entering into the other one, an application that aims to speed up the process of crossing the border.
The project is the latest effort to boost bilateral ties between the two neighbors. “Since the project needs to be run on a basis of mutual trust, it will help cement recent positive developments in the Syrian-Turkish relationship,”’ said the Turkish customs agency.
Turkey and Syria, once two hostile neighbors, have decided to open up to each other in the last decade. Since then the relationship has spiraled up, resulting in unprecedented deals such as the mutual abolishment of visa requirements. Nusaybin is of the border areas that were once riddled with land mines but which were cleared and opened to public access.
Once the outfitting of the customs gate is completed, Nusaybin will be a gateway to the Middle East, easing travel from Turkey to points south and significantly contributing to the region’s economy. In recent years the government in Turkey has aimed to modernize the customs gates to meet the needs of business. The financial part of such projects will utilize the build-operate-transfer (BOT) model and require the state and private sector to work hand-in-hand. So far seven border gates have already been modernized using the BOT model, and a few other similar projects are already under way, the Nusaybin gate being one of them.
Thanks to the process of modernization of the border gates, vehicle and human crossings are already four times faster than before, serving 3.5 million vehicles and more than 10 million people a year. The financial cost for such modernization projects has reached TL 248 million.
The Nusaybin project was developed as a pilot project by officials in Turkey and Syria for the future of other shared border-gate projects. Since such projects will speed up border crossings by eliminating the repetition of the border-crossing process, it is expected to substantially improve the volume of bilateral trade. The groundbreaking ceremony for the Nusaybin border gate will be held in Nusaybin on Feb. 26, with State Minister Hayati Yazıcı and Syrian Finance Minister Mouhammad al-Hussein in attendance.
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