Category: Iraq

Iraq Rejects Refuge for Turkey’s Kurdish Fighters

By SINAN SALAHEDDIN Associated Press

BAGHDAD May 9, 2013 (AP)

Iraq on Thursday rejected a key element of an accord to bring an end to a long Kurdish uprising in Turkey — offering refuge to rebel fighters in country’s north.

In March, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, announced a deal to end a nearly three-decade conflict in turkey that has killed tens of thousands of people. The deal was reached in talks between imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and the Turkish government.

The refuge offer came from Iraq’s Kurdish region, which enjoys limited independence from the central Iraqi government in Baghdad. Iraqi Kurds were involved in the talks with Turkey.

The prospect of additional fighters joining the Kurdish forces in Iraq’s north could add tension to already souring relations with Baghdad. The two sides are in conflict over contested areas, including key oil-producing sectors.

As part of the accord, the PKK rebels agreed to a gradual retreat from Turkish territory to Iraq’s Kurdish region. On Thursday, Baghdad rejected that.

“The Iraqi government welcomes any political and peaceful settlement to the Kurdish cause in Turkey to stop the bloodshed and violence between the two sides and adopt a democratic approach to end this internal struggle,” said a statement issued by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry.

“But at the same time … it does not accept the entry of armed groups to its territories that can be used to harm Iraq’s security and stability,” the ministry said.

PKK, considered a terror group by Turkey and its Western allies, is believed to have between 1,500 and 2,000 fighters inside Turkey, in addition to several thousand more based in northern Iraq, which they use as a springboard for attacks in Turkey.

To ease Baghdad’s concerns, PKK spokesman, Ahmet Deniz assured the Iraqi government that the plan would boost democracy and stability in the region.

“The (peace) process is not aimed against anyone, and there is no need for concerns that the struggle will take on another format and pose a threat to others,” Deniz told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

“A democratic resolution will have a positive effect on the region,” Deniz said. “We understand the concerns, but the process is related to the resolution of the Kurdish issue and won’t cause harm to anyone.”

The statement came a day after PKK rebels started withdrawing to bases in the Iraqi mountains. It was not clear if the Baghdad government would try to stop the process, expected to take several months.

Deniz confirmed that the PKK’s withdrawal process began on Wednesday. He gave no details on the numbers of fighters that had begun to retreat or if any had crossed into Iraq.

Iraqi and Turkish officials were not immediately available for comment.

PKK has sought greater autonomy and more rights for Turkey’s Kurds. The armed conflict between the two sides began in 1984.

In addition to the dispute over developing oil resources, the Kurds and the central government in Baghdad have been in a long-running dispute over lands claimed by the Kurds, power-sharing and rights to develop other natural resources.

Along with Sunni Arabs, the Kurds accuse Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, of amassing power in his hands and marginalizing political opponents.

Relations between Iraq and Turkey have been strained since December, when fugitive Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi took refuge in Turkey following accusations by Shiite-led government that he was running death squads. Turkish officials rejected Baghdad’s request to hand over al-Hashemi, who was tried and convicted in absentia.

Turkish support for Sunni-led anti-government protests and a unilateral energy deal with Iraqi Kurds has added tension to relations between Baghdad and Ankara.

———

Associated Press writer Suzan Frazer in Ankara, Turkey contributed to this report.

via Iraq Rejects Refuge for Turkey’s Kurdish Fighters – ABC News.

May 10, 2013
Jackson Diehl: Iraqi Kurdistan in bloom

In Iraq, an Kurdish renaissance

By Jackson Diehl, Published: April 15

By now it’s obvious that “spring” is the wrong description of the political turmoil and civil war that have followed the Arab revolutions of 2011. But for one nation in the Middle East, it’s beginning to look like freedom and prosperity just might be blooming. “People are beginning to talk about the Kurdish Spring, not the Arab Spring,” says a grinning Fuad Hussein, a senior official in the government of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Hussein and a delegation from the Kurdistan Region Government, which controls a strip of northern Iraq slightly larger than Maryland, were in Washington last week to talk about where their country stands a decade after the U.S. invasion. From Irbil, Kurdistan’s capital, the war looks like an extraordinary success.

Jackson Diehl

The Post’s deputy editorial page editor, Diehl also writes a biweekly foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

Kurdistan is a democracy, though an imperfect one; the territory is peaceful and the economy is booming at the rate of 11 percent a year. Foreign investors are pouring though gleaming new airports to invest, especially in Kurdish-controlled oil fields. Exxon, Chevron, Gazprom and Total are among the multinationals to sign deals with the regional government. A new pipeline from Kurdistan to Turkey could allow exports to soar to 1 million barrels a day within a couple of years.

There was one university for the region’s 5.2 million people a decade ago; now there are 30. “Our people,” says Hussein, the chief of staff to President Massoud Barzani, “did quite good.”

The bigger story is that Kurds, a non-Arab nation of some 30 million deprived of a state and divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, are on the verge of transcending their long, benighted history as the region’s perpetual victims and pawns. Twenty-five years ago, Kurds were being slaughtered with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein and persecuted by Turkey, where nearly half live. A vicious guerrilla war raged between Kurdish insurgents and the Turkish army.

Now Turkey is emerging as the Kurds’ closest ally and the potential enabler of a string of adjacent, self-governing Kurdish communities stretching from Syria to the Iraq-Iran border. Having built close ties with the Iraqi Kurdish government, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now negotiating a peace deal with the insurgent Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) — a pact that could mean new language and cultural rights, as well as elected local governments, for the Kurdish-populated areas of southeastern Turkey.

Meanwhile, Barzani and the Iraqi Kurds have been trying to foster a Kurdish self-government for northern Syria, where some 2.5 million Kurds live. Syrian government forces withdrew from the area last year, giving the Kurds the chance to set up their own administration. Until recently, the principal Syrian Kurdish party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), was supporting the PKK’s fight against Turkey and leaning toward the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Now, thanks to the nascent peace deal, it may be switching sides: Earlier this month its fighters joined with Syrian rebels to drive government forces out of a Kurdish-populated district of Aleppo.

Middle Eastern geo-politics, which for so long worked against the Kurds, is now working for them. The sectarian fragmentation of Syria and Iraq has created new space for a nation that is mostly Sunni Muslim, but moderate and secular. Suddenly the Kurds are being courted by all sides. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this month sent a delegation to Irbil to propose that the Kurds return the parliament deputies and ministers they withdrew from the national government last year. Barzani’s government declined but agreed to send a delegation to Baghdad for negotiations.

As Hussein portrays it, the talks may be a last chance to avert a breakup of Iraq into separate Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish areas — a split he blames on Maliki’s attempt to concentrate Shiite power. “Either we are going to have a real partnership, or we are going to go back to our own people,” he said, adding that the result could be a referendum on Kurdistan’s future.

It would make sense for the United States to join Turkey in backing this Kurdish renaissance; the Kurds are a moderate and pro-Western force in an increasingly volatile region. Yet the Obama administration has consistently been at odds with the Iraqi Kurdish government. It has lobbied Turkey not to allow the new oil pipeline that would give Kurdistan economic independence from Baghdad, and, in the Kurds’ view, repeatedly backed Maliki’s attempts to impose his authority on the region.

“The administration sees us not as a stabilizing force, but as an irritant, as an alien presence in the region that complicates matters, another Israel,” one of the visiting Kurds told me. That, like so much of the administration’s policy in the Middle East these days, is wrongheaded.

via Jackson Diehl: Iraqi Kurdistan in bloom – The Washington Post.

April 16, 2013
Turkey, Iraq, and Oil

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
The American Spectator

https://www.meforum.org/3484/turkey-iraq-oil

Though the pace of growth of the Turkish economy has slowed significantly, one of Ankara’s priorities over the coming years is to meet the country’s growing energy demands. The clearest solution is to diversify suppliers of oil and gas, with the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan (KRG) area being one potential source for such fuels.
Had you asked me a few months ago about the Turkish policy on acquiring energy resources from the KRG via an independent pipeline project and against the will of the Iraqi central government, I would have said that Ankara was still ambiguous on the matter, but now it seems clear that the Turkish government under Prime Minister Erdoğan intends to move forward with such plans.

The first sign of an advance in the framework of an informal commercial deal between the KRG and Ankara on this issue was a report by Ben Van Heuvelen for the Iraq Oil Report. Relying on the testimony of “multiple senior Turkish officials,” Heuvelen reports that the terms would include “stakes in at least half a dozen exploration for the direct pipeline export of oil and gas from the KRG.”
Multiple other sources can be used to confirm Heuvelen’s report. Following the visit of KRG premier Nechirvan Barzani in Ankara to meet with Erdoğan on March 26 where the two leaders apparently agreed to begin implementing the energy cooperation plan, the Turkish opposition party CHP attempted to launch a no-confidence motion in parliament against Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu on account of the energy deal with the KRG. The no-confidence motion failed.
CHP member Osman Korutürk claimed that a pipeline agreement in particular contradicted Davutoğlu’s declared principle of “zero problems” with neighboring countries, noting the objections of Baghdad and Washington to the development of energy ties between the KRG and Turkey without the Iraqi government’s consent.
The Turkish premier’s response to this initiative by the CHP, which is similarly opposed to Ankara’s firm anti-Assad stance vis-à-vis Syria, was to indicate that the issue should be taken up with Energy Minister Taner Yildiz, who proceeded in a speech to acknowledge the idea of maintaining Iraq’s unity as one of the top priorities of Turkish foreign policy, while arguing that the KRG had a constitutional right to develop energy ties with Ankara and is entitled to 17% of Iraq’s budget as per a 2006 agreement between Arbil and Baghdad.
In a subsequent interview with CNN Turk, Erdoğan invoked many of the same points as Yildiz in arguing that Turkey had the right to make energy agreements with the KRG, adding that under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, there is no real unity in Iraq anyway.
The point about the KRG’s budget share of 17% — invoked by Erdoğan and Yildiz — is key to Turkey’s official justification for moving forward with developing energy ties with the KRG unilaterally while also claiming to uphold Iraq’s unity. Ankara’s reasoning appears to be as follows: through developing energy ties, KRG will boost its oil production and therefore in terms of Iraq’s overall revenues, the KRG will be contributing 17% and thus match its share of the budget.
At present, the budget share to which the KRG is entitled is well above the autonomous region’s oil output as a proportion of Iraq’s revenues, the overwhelming majority of which comes from the oil industry. Baghdad’s complaint — as reflected in the words of Abdullah al-Amir (the chief advisor to Iraq’s deputy minister for energy affairs) — is that allegedly, only a third of KRG oil revenues reach the central government.
This complaint is not necessarily divorced from reality. In truth, the Turkish government’s official justification for implementing an energy agreement with the KRG while claiming to uphold Iraq’s unity is specious.
Notice that in the interview with CNN Turk (as I have pointed out above, but was omitted in the English reports), Erdoğan said that there is no real unity in Iraq anyway. At the same time, it should be emphasized that Ankara still does not support actual Kurdish independence.
Rather, the goal is to make the KRG a virtual client state of Turkey while ensuring that the autonomous region at least remains nominally part of Iraq. As Ben Van Heuvelen pointed out to me, this goal is “almost explicit policy” on the part of Ankara.
In turn, Zaab Sethna draws an analogy with the Turkish-occupied territory of northern Cyprus, in relation to which Turkish officials are now pressing Israel not to develop natural gas deals with the Cypriot government without incorporating Ankara into the negotiations. Aware of Baghdad’s disapproval of dealing with the KRG unilaterally, the Turkish government appears to be trying to pursue a rapprochement with the Iraqi government anyway: perhaps to induce it to accept the Turkey-KRG agreement. The rapprochement initiative began with a meeting between Davutoğlu and Iraq’s Vice-President Khudayr al-Khozaie at the Arab League Summit in Doha at the end of last month, in which a desire to restart friendly bilateral ties was expressed — something that Khozaie acknowledged on his return to Baghdad.
Building on these hints of rapprochement, Iraq has now put forward an offer to build an oil pipeline from Basra to Ceyhan in southern Turkey, in which Yildiz has expressed an interest. Even so, if Baghdad is hoping that this counter-offer will dissuade Ankara from proceeding to forge energy ties with the KRG, then the central government is quite mistaken.
It seems most likely that Turkey, like Exxon Mobil with its oil contracts in Iraq, will try to have it both ways by continuing to express an interest in a Basra-Ceyhan pipeline project as well, but could also drop the proposal entirely in favor of continuing to develop the energy deal with the KRG. Further, it is improbable that a compromise will be reached on the issue: a whole series of temporary agreements have arisen in the past on oil disputes between the KRG and the Iraqi central government, but the foundations of the quarrel have never been truly tackled. There is no doubt that the dispute over the budget for this year pushed the KRG to move forward with Ankara in cementing the energy deal.
At present, there is little the Iraqi government can do to stop Ankara beyond saber-rattling rhetoric. A violent confrontation is out of the question, and appealing to Washington to pressure Turkey to reconsider has been unsuccessful.
This failure of persuasion demonstrates the very limited U.S. leverage in the dispute, and while Turkish officials have expressed hope that Washington will eventually take Ankara’s side, they are obviously not pleased that the Americans sided with Baghdad.
From this point follows another conclusion: namely, it is all the more likely that Turkey will continue to resist any future U.S. or wider Western pressure to drop energy and economic ties with Iran amid the sanctions.
Ankara may be diversifying its energy sources, but that does not translate to dropping oil imports from Iran or ending the trade in gold for natural gas. An independent oil and gas pipeline project with the KRG will take years to become fully operational, and there is no reason to assume it is mutually exclusive from continuing energy ties with Iran, just as it is wrong to presume that the KRG will end oil smuggling to Iran just because of an energy agreement with Turkey.
Whatever disagreements Iran and Turkey have about Syria, it important to note the cases of Iraq-Jordan and Iran/Iraq-Egypteconomic ties. Strategic regional outlook is not the same as strengthening economic relations, and so one must avoid interpreting Turkey’s cultivation of energy ties with the KRG as a move away from Iran by either party.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University.

April 8, 2013
Kerry to press Turkey on Israel ties, Syrian border, Iraq

REUTERS/Paul J. Richards/Pool

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry talks to reporters after finding out that the aircraft had a mechanical failure before take off, at the Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland April 6, 2013.

By Arshad Mohammed, Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will press Turkey on Sunday to quickly normalize relations with Israel, keep its border with Syria open to refugees and improve ties with Iraq, a senior U.S. official said.

Kerry arrived in Istanbul some two weeks after U.S. President Barack Obama brokered a rapprochement between Turkey and Israel, whose relations were shattered by the killing of nine Turkish citizens in a 2010 Israeli naval raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla.

The rapprochement could help regional coordination to contain spillover from the Syrian civil war and ease Israel’s diplomatic isolation in the Middle East as it faces challenges posed by Iran’s nuclear program.

Despite Obama’s having pulled off a diplomatic coup on March 22 – a three-way telephone call with the Israeli and Turkish prime ministers, who had not spoken since 2011 – Washington has some concerns that Turkey might be backtracking on the deal.

Israel bowed to a long-standing demand by Ankara, once its close strategic partner, to apologize formally for the deaths aboard the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara. It was boarded by Israeli marines who had intercepted a flotilla challenging Israel’s naval blockade of the Palestinian-run Gaza Strip.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he had agreed to conclude an agreement on compensation and that he and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan agreed to normalize ties, including returning their ambassadors to their posts.

A senior U.S. official told reporters traveling with Kerry that he “will encourage Turkey to expeditiously implement its agreement with Israel and fully normalize their relationship to allow for deeper cooperation between the two countries.”

While the official denied the United States was worried the Turkish government might be backing away from the deal, another U.S. official earlier this week said Washington was concerned.

Kerry will also raise Syria and Iraq during his talks on Sunday with Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Istanbul, his first stop on a 10-day trip to the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

One of the underlying motivations for the Israeli-Turkish rapprochement, at least on the Israeli side, has been a desire to secure allies in the region as the Syrian civil war churns into its third year.

Kerry’s message in Istanbul will include “reiterating the importance of keeping the borders open to Syrians fleeing from violence,” the senior U.S. official told reporters with Kerry.

The official said this was a reference to reports, which Turkey denied on March 28, that it had rounded up and deported hundreds of Syrian refugees following unrest at a border camp.

Witnesses said hundreds of Syrians were bussed to the border after clashes in which refugees in the Suleymansah camp, near the Turkish town of Akcakale, threw rocks at military police, who fired teargas and water cannon.

Turkey’s foreign ministry said 130 people, identified as being “involved in the provocations,” crossed back into Syria voluntarily, either because they did not want to face judicial proceedings or because of repercussions from other refugees.

The incident highlighted the strain that the exodus from Syria’s civil war is placing on neighboring states.

Since the revolt in Syria began two years ago, more than 1.2 million Syrians fleeing violence and persecution have registered as refugees or await processing in neighboring countries and North Africa, according to U.N. figures.

They include 261,635 in Turkey, mostly staying in 17 camps, many of them teeming.

Kerry also plans to nudge Turkey to improve ties with Iraq, which is troubled by efforts by its autonomous Kurdistan region, where ethnic Kurds have administered their affairs since 1991, to sell energy to Turkey.

The Iraqi central government argues that this would deprive it of oil revenues that belong to Iraq as a whole.

via Kerry to press Turkey on Israel ties, Syrian border, Iraq – World News.

April 8, 2013
Iraq PM softens tone on Turkey, says rapprochement welcome

BAGHDAD | Fri Apr 5, 2013 11:41am EDT

(Reuters) – Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Friday he would welcome rapprochement with Turkey, softening months of hostile rhetoric fuelled by Ankara’s engagement with Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region.

Resource-hungry Turkey has antagonized Baghdad by courting Iraqi Kurds, who are at loggerheads with the central government over how to exploit the country’s oil reserves and share the revenues.

Ankara and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have been negotiating an energy deal ranging from exploration to export since last year.

Officials and industry sources say there have been efforts behind the scenes to reconcile Baghdad and Ankara at the insistence of the United States, which fears a Turk-Kurd energy partnership could precipitate the break-up of Iraq.

“Iraq welcomes any step towards rapprochement with Turkey on the basis of shared interests, mutual respect and good-neighborliness,” Maliki said in a statement posted on his website.

Baghdad says it alone has the authority to control export of the world’s fourth largest oil reserves, while the Kurds say their right to do so is enshrined in Iraq’s federal constitution, drawn up following the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.

Kurdish crude used to flow through a Baghdad-controlled pipeline running from Kirkuk to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, but exports via that pipeline dried up last December due to a row over payment.

The KRG is now shipping small volumes of crude oil by truck to Turkey and is pressing ahead with plans to build its own export pipeline — moves that have prompted Baghdad to accuse Ankara of complicity in “smuggling” Iraqi oil.

In an interview on Thursday, Turkey’s energy minister suggested “a structure” whereby Ankara would play an active role in distributing Iraqi oil revenues fairly.

“We accept that any revenue that reaches any region of Iraq belongs to the whole of Iraq and this is also the correct thing,” Taner Yildiz said. “With everything we do we have to pay attention to the sensitivities of the Iraqi central government.”

Besides the spat over oil, Maliki and his Turkish counterpart have also traded barbs for inciting sectarian tensions and summoned each others’ ambassadors in tit-for-tat maneuvers.

“There are contacts,” Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in the Kurdish region’s city of Suleimaniyah in March.

Zebari said a meeting between Maliki and Turkish President Abdullah Gul had almost materialized in Cairo, but was scuppered at the last minute.

Asked whether improved relations between Ankara and Baghdad would come at Kurdistan’s expense, Zebari said: “No … as long as they are working and dealing within the Iraqi legal framework and constitution, it shouldn’t be affected.”

(Reporting by Raheem Salman in Baghdad, Isabel Coles in Arbil; Additional reporting by Orhan Coskun in Ankara; editing by Mike Collett-White)

via Iraq PM softens tone on Turkey, says rapprochement welcome | Reuters.

April 6, 2013
Iraqi goods travel to Turkey via Israel

Iraqi goods travel to Turkey via Israel

Following secret talks due to civil war in Syria, Jordan River Crossing and Haifa Port used to transport merchandise between Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and other countries

Gad Lior

Published: 04.05.13, 13:34 / Israel Business

Dozens of trucks carrying goods from Iraq, Jordan and Turkey have been travelling on Israel’s roads on a daily basis recently, following secret talks between Israeli and Turkish officials and senior officials from neighboring Arab countries.

Yedioth Ahronoth has learned that following the intensification of battles in Syria and the near collapse of the country’s regime, and after merchandise transported by convoys from Turkey to Iraq and Jordan, and vice versa, was robbed – the Jordan River Crossing (near Beit She’an) and the Haifa and Ashdod Ports have become an alternative for the transport of goods.

Every day, trucks arrive from Jordan and Iraq at the Jordan River Crossing, where the goods they are carrying are loaded onto Israeli trucks, which usually take them to the Haifa Port. From the port they are transported by sea to Turkey and other countries, where trucks from Iraq and Jordan used to travel via Syria.

First-of-its-kind cooperation

A similar way is made by goods imported from Turkey and neighboring countries to Jordan and Iraq, which arrive at the port on ships. The vessels unload their cargo there, and the merchandise is taken by trucks to the Jordan River Crossing on its way to Jordan and Iraq.

According to estimates, the goods transported through Israel are worth tens of millions of dollars a month.

“Israel’s roads have turned into a transport pipe for exports and imports of goods and commodities from and to Jordan and Iraq,” confirmed a source at the Tax Authority, which is in charge of transporting the goods and inspecting them on the land border.

“These goods and products are not usually flown, but transferred in containers through trucks by land – and now by sea as well,” the source added.

Yedioth Ahronoth has learned that the transport operation is part of a first-its-kind cooperation between the customs authorities and transportation officials in Jordan Iraq and Turkey, and Tax Authority and other government officials in Israel.

The goods and deliveries undergo a strict security check in order to prevent the option of taking advantage of the Israeli gesture, which does not involve a very high profit for Israel, in order to carry out terror attacks or transfer weapons.

via Iraqi goods travel to Turkey via Israel – Israel Business, Ynetnews.

April 6, 2013