Iraq–Turkey relations

Iraq's Kurdish political bloc is heading back to Iraqi Kurdistan for a final meeting on Sept. 8 to decide whether to participate in the next national government, the Kurds' top negotiator Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters.

Turkey is in talks with Israel and Egypt about establishing an air corridor to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza and evacuate potentially thousands of injured Palestinians for treatment in Turkey, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said on Aug. 6.

Ankara is mobilizing aid to protect Iraqi Turkmens on the southern neighbor’s territory in response to the threat posed by the jihadist ISIL Turkey is accelerating its plans to help construct a new refugee camp in northern Iraq for Turkmens who were forced to flee north after the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL) captured the Sinjar region.

Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region has begun to pump oil from Kirkuk fields previously controlled by Iraq’s central government into the pipeline system that runs in its own territory, a senior Iraqi oil official said on July 17.

Iraqi Kurds have offered Turkey cooperation on the ongoing hostage crisis, particularly sharing intelligence information regarding the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a senior Turkish Foreign Ministry official has said. 

Of the $30 billion Iraqi imports, a third is from Turkey. Gaziantep alone provides around a fifth of Iraq’s imports. So Iraq by itself is important for Turkey. Now two things are happening at once. First of all, it is getting increasingly harder to send trucks down to Iraq. Secondly, Iraqi import demand is declining rather rapidly as Iraq transforms into a war zone.

On the 21st day of their captivity, 32 Turkish truck drivers were released on July 3, by militants belonging to the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) near Iraq’s second biggest city of Mosul in the north.

The Arab Spring has turned out to be a massive failure.

It did not bring democracy to the Arab peoples.

It brought a new era of coup d’etats like in Egypt, chaos and division like in Libya, and civil war and the decomposition of existing borders in Syria and Iraq.

Iraq’s self-ruling Kurds outlined plans to swiftly ramp up oil exports now that their forces have seized control of Iraq’s main northern oil fields.

Kurdish Natural Resources Minister Ashti Hawrami told Reuters the Kurds had plans to increase their exports eight-fold by the end of 2015, including pumping oil from the fields taken by Kurdish fighters two weeks ago.

The prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) held talks in Ankara on June 26, amid growing unrest in Iraq. Both Nechirvan Barzani and Turkish officials agreed on the need for the establishment of an inclusive Iraqi government as soon as possible.