Iraq escalates Turkey row
TURKISH FOREIGN MINISTER AND SPY CHIEF TO TRAVEL TO BAGHDAD TO DISCUSS ISSUE
Iraq has urged the United Nations Security Council’s permanent members and “friendly nations” to mobilise support for a resolution to condemn Turkey’s troop deployment in northern Iraq, which it said violated Iraq’s sovereignty.
Iraq has also asked the Arab League to hold an extraordinary meeting of Arab foreign ministers to consider “the escalation of the Turkish violation and adopt an Arab attitude against it,” Ahmad Jamal, a spokesman for the Iraqi foreign ministry, said in a statement posted on the ministry’s website yesterday.
The Iraqi government has also ordered the closure of the country’s commercial office in Istanbul, according to Hashem Hatem, director of foreign economic relations at the Ministry of Trade. Authorities may take “tougher steps,” including cutting trade ties with Turkey, he said. Total trade between the two countries amounts to about $11 billion (Dh40.3 billion) a year, he said by phone.
The closure of the Istanbul office is a “message to Turkey,” Hatem said. “If Turkey maintains its position, what would be the benefit of trade if Iraq’s sovereignty is breached?”
Training of Iraqi militias
Turkey denies violating Iraq’s territorial integrity and says it sent troops last week to Bashiqa camp, northeast of Mosul, only to expand the training of Iraqi militias fighting Daesh. Turkey has no plan to withdraw its soldiers stationed in the country, though there will be no further deployments, Turkish Foreign Ministry Spokesman Tanju Bilgic said on Tuesday.
Turkey’s deployment added to a wider arms buildup in the region as the military intervention against Daesh in Syria and Iraq intensifies. Russia and Nato have deployed more warplanes and warships since Turkish aircraft shot down a Russian fighter jet last month. In Iraq, the US-backed government’s struggles against Daesh leave the second-largest oil producer in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries vulnerable to break up along ethnic and sectarian lines.
Abandoned claim
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioglu and head of Turkey’s intelligence agency, Hakan Fidan, were scheduled to travel to Baghdad yesterday to discuss last week’s deployment. The first leaders of the Turkish republic, founded in 1923, sought to include oil-rich Kirkuk and Mosul in northern Iraq within its borders. Turkey abandoned its claim to the territory in 1926, yet it has continued to seek influence there.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview aired on Wednesday that Turkish troops had been stationed at a military base in northern Iraq at the request of Iraq’s leader since 2014, but Iraq had not made it an issue until this week.
“We were asked by Prime Minister [Haider] Al Abadi to help train soldiers and, at his request, we set up a training camp in Bashiqa in 2014,” Erdogan was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera. Erdogan said Al Abadi “did not say a word until just now” because of developments in the region.
On Saturday, Iraq’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Turkish ambassador to demand that Turkey immediately withdraw hundreds of troops deployed in recent days to northern Iraq, near the Daesh-controlled city of Mosul.