Resurgent Turkey Flexes Its Muscles Around Iraq

Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times
Iraqis in Erbil waited for visas to visit Turkey outside the
consulate, which issues as many as 300 a day. More Photos >>
By ANTHONY SHADID
Published: January 4, 2011

¶ ZAKHO, Iraq — A Turkey as resurgent as at any time since its Ottoman
glory is projecting influence through a turbulent Iraq, from the
boomtowns of the north to the oil fields near southernmost Basra, in a
show of power that illustrates its growing heft across an Arab world
long suspicious of it.
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¶ Its ascent here, in an arena contested by the United States and
Iran, may prove its greatest success so far, as it emerges from the
shadow of its alliance with the West to chart an often assertive and
independent foreign policy.

¶ Turkey’s influence is greater in northern Iraq and broader, though
not deeper, than Iran’s in the rest of the country. While the United
States invaded and occupied Iraq, losing more than 4,400 troops there,
Turkey now exerts what may prove a more lasting legacy — so-called
soft power, the assertion of influence through culture, education and
business.

¶ “This is the trick — we are very much welcome here,” said Ali Riza
Ozcoskun, who heads Turkey’s consulate in Basra, one of four
diplomatic posts it has in Iraq.

¶ Turkey’s newfound influence here has played out along an axis that
runs roughly from Zakho in the north to Basra, by way of the capital,
Baghdad. For a country that once deemed the Kurdish region in northern
Iraq an existential threat, Turkey has embarked on the beginning of
what might be called a beautiful friendship.

¶ In the Iraqi capital, where politics are not for the faint-hearted,
it promoted a secular coalition that it helped build, drawing the ire
of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, along the way. For
Iraq’s abundant oil and gas, it has positioned itself as the country’s
gateway to Europe, while helping to satisfy its own growing energy
needs.

¶ Just as the Justice and Development Party of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan has reoriented politics in Turkey, it is doing so in
Iraq, with repercussions for the rest of the region.

¶ While some Turkish officials recoil at the notion of neo-Ottomanism
— an orientation of Turkey away from Europe and toward an empire that
once included parts of three continents — the country’s process of
globalization and attention to the markets of the Middle East is
upsetting assumptions that only American power is decisive. Turkey has
committed itself here to economic integration, seeing its future in at
least an echo of its past.

¶ “No one is trying to overtake Iraq or one part of Iraq,” said Aydin
Selcen, who heads the consulate in Erbil, which opened this year. “But
we are going to integrate with this country. Roads, railroads,
airports, oil and gas pipelines — there will be a free flow of people
and goods between the two sides of the border.”

¶ By the border, he meant Zakho and the 26-lane checkpoint of Ibrahim
Khalil, where 1,500 trucks pass daily, bringing Turkish building
materials, clothes, furniture, food and pretty much everything else
that fills shops in northern Iraq.

¶ The economic boom they have helped propel has reverberated across
Iraq. Trade between the two countries amounted to about $6 billion in
2010, almost double what it was in 2008, Turkish officials say. They
project that, in two or three years, Iraq may be Turkey’s biggest
export market.

¶ “This is the very beginning,” said Rushdi Said, the flamboyant Iraqi
Kurdish chairman of Adel United, a company involved in everything from
mining to sprawling housing projects. “All of the world has started
fighting over Iraq. They’re fighting for the money.”

¶Ambition, in 4 Languages

¶ Mr. Said’s suit, accented by a black-and-white handkerchief in the
pocket, shines like his optimism, the get-rich-quick kind. In some
ways, he is a reincarnation of an Ottoman merchant, at ease in
Kurdish, Turkish, Persian and Arabic. In any of those languages, he
boasts of what he plans.

¶ He has thought of contacting Angelina Jolie, “maybe Arnold and
Sylvester, too,” to interest them in some of his 11 projects across
Iraq to build 100,000 villas and apartments at the cost of a few
billion dollars. So far, though, his best partner is the singer
Ibrahim Tatlises, the Turkish-born Kurdish superstar, whose portrait
adorns Mr. Said’s advertisement for his project the Plain of Paradise.

¶ “The villas are ready!” Mr. Tatlises says in television ads. “Come!
Come! Come!”

¶ Erbil, the Kurdish capital in the north where Mr. Said lives, has
become the nexus of Turkish politics and business, made possible by
the sharp edge of military power.

¶ About 15,000 Turks work in Erbil and other parts of the north, and
Turkish companies, more than 700 of them, make up two-thirds of all
foreign companies in the region. Travel requirements have been lifted,
and the consulate in Erbil issues as many as 300 visas a day. A
Turkish religious movement operates 19 schools in the region,
educating 5,500 students, Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds mingling in a
lingua franca of English.

¶ Turkish officials talk about transforming the region into something
akin to the American-Mexican border, a frontier as ambiguous as any
line on a map is precise. Even some Kurdish officials have embraced
the idea, though interpreting the notion differently.

¶ While Turkey sees integration as a way to tap nascent markets in the
Middle East, some Kurdish officials have seen it more emotionally, as
a way to bind them to Kurdish regions in neighboring countries that no
degree of political negotiations could ever achieve.

¶ “The borders between us were not drawn by us,” Kamal Kirkuki, the
speaker of the local Kurdish Parliament, said of the frontier with
Turkey, Iran and Syria, all with Kurdish minorities, “It’s a de facto
border and we have to respect it, but in our hearts we don’t see it.
We want to integrate the people without any bureaucracies keeping them
apart.”

¶ Kurds represent nearly 20 percent of Turkey’s population, and
Turkish governments have long viewed calls for their
self-determination as a fundamental threat to the state. The same went
for Kurds in Iraq, whose autonomy might provide an inspiration to
Turkey’s own minority. Since 2007, those assumptions have undergone a
seismic shift.

¶ Over the smoldering reservations of the Turkish military, which has
carried out repeated coups against elected governments, Mr. Erdogan
has undertaken halting steps to reconcile with Turkey’s own Kurds in
what the government has termed “the Kurdish opening.” They have met
with mixed success, but the new climate reflects the changes: Turkish
diplomats here casually refer to Iraqi Kurdistan — the K-word long
being a taboo — and Massoud Barzani, that region’s president, no
longer talks about Greater Kurdistan.

¶Diplomatic Balancing Act

¶ Less publicly, American officials in late 2007 began to support
Turkish military action against Kurdish rebels in Turkey who have
sought refuge in northern Iraq. Turkey still keeps as many as 1,500
troops here, officials say, and the cooperation has allowed them, as a
senior American official put it, “to quite effectively strike” the
Kurdish rebels.

¶ Iraqi officials in Erbil and Baghdad have protested, requiring a
measure of American diplomacy to soothe their resentment. But at least
for now, Kurdish officials have viewed their alliance with Turkey as a
greater priority in a region still contested by Iran.

¶ “Kurdistan is not against the interests of Turkey,” Mr. Kirkuki said
simply. A surprising feature of Turkey’s success is the image it has
managed to project in Iraq. On the road from Erbil to Baghdad, its pop
culture is everywhere.

¶ Posters of Turkish television serials — from “Muhannad and Nour” to
“Forbidden Love” — sell by the tens of thousands. The action series
“Valley of the Wolves” is a sensation, the lead actor lending his name
to cafes. His own posters are computer-altered to show him in
traditional Kurdish or Arab dress — grist for a graduate school
seminar on the adaptability of cultural symbols.

¶ Its political influence in Baghdad is no less widespread. Unlike
Iran and the United States, it has cultivated ties with virtually
every bloc in the country, though relations with Mr. Maliki have
proved difficult at times. (At one point, his officials tried to
revoke the Turkish ambassador’s credentials to enter the Green Zone.
“A misunderstanding,” Turkish diplomats called it.)

¶ Turkish diplomats stay for two years, unlike the one-year posting
for Americans, and over that time, they have managed to reach out to
unlikely partners, namely the followers of the populist Shiite cleric
Moktada al-Sadr.

¶ Most of Mr. Sadr’s bloc of lawmakers traveled to the Turkish
capital, Ankara, for training in parliamentary protocol. In October,
Turks were the only diplomats to attend a commemoration the Sadrists
held at Baghdad University. “It is not a group to be excluded,” one of
them said.

¶ Courting the Sadrists, though, is a sideshow to the real prize being
sought in the prolonged months of negotiations over a new government.

¶ Turkey strongly backed the fortunes of a coalition led by Ayad
Allawi, a secular Shiite politician who enjoys the support of the
country’s Sunnis. More than any other country, Iraq’s Arab neighbors
included, it is credited with forging the coalition in the first
place.

¶ American and Turkish interests did not always line up on the
government’s formation, and some diplomats questioned whether American
officials were perceived as backing Mr. Maliki too strongly.

¶ “A high-wire act,” said the senior American official, describing
Turkish-American relations generally.

¶ Yet those interests are roughly aligned now, and the degree of power
Mr. Allawi’s coalition eventually plays in the government will vividly
illustrate Turkey’s relative weight in Iraq.

¶ “I’d say the Turks put a lot of effort into it,” the official said,
“and they still are.”

¶Building Connections

¶ In southernmost Iraq, the old Ottoman quarter in faded Basra is
crumbling. Its windows are patched with cinder block, though the
stench of sewage still seeps in. Across town is the Basra
International Fair Ground, built by Turks and opened in June. Three
fairs have already been held there, including one organized in
November for Iraq’s petroleum industry.

¶ Oil is still king in Iraq, and as much as anything else, underlines
Turkey’s interests here. The pipeline from Kirkuk, Iraq, to Ceyhan,
Turkey, already carries roughly 25 percent of Iraq’s oil exports.

¶ The Turks have signed on to the ambitious $11 billion Nabucco gas
pipeline project, which may bypass Russia and bring Iraqi gas to
Europe. Turkish companies have two stakes in oil contracts, and two
more in gas projects, potentially worth billions of dollars. In a land
of oil, no place has more than Basra.

¶ Turkish ships offshore provide 250 megawatts of electricity a day.
Turkish companies have refurbished the Sheraton Hotel in Basra and are
helping to build a 65,000-seat stadium. The Turkish national air
carrier is planning four flights a week from Istanbul to Basra; only
one is offered now, by Iraqi Airways. Vortex, Crazy Dance and other
amusement rides in Basraland are Turkish. So are the sweets sold
there.

¶ “No one is working here except Turkey,” said Mr. Ozcoskun, the
Turkish consul in Basra.

¶ It was a bit of overstatement from the garrulous diplomat, but not by much.

¶ “Basra is virgin,” he said, a phrase Turkish diplomats volunteer
about the rest of Iraq, too. “Who comes first, who establishes first,
who makes contacts first will make the most profit in the future. I
don’t feel any competition right now. Not at all.