{"id":18290,"date":"2018-10-13T08:24:52","date_gmt":"2018-10-13T08:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=18290"},"modified":"2018-10-13T08:24:52","modified_gmt":"2018-10-13T08:24:52","slug":"turkey-to-reopen-its-consulates-in-iraq-fm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=18290","title":{"rendered":"Turkey to reopen its consulates in Iraq: FM"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nANKARA: Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Thursday said his country will soon reopen its consulates in the Iraqi cities of Basra in the south and Mosul in the north, which were closed due to security reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nDuring his visit to Iraq to meet with newly appointed President Barham Salih and Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, Cavusoglu also announced Turkey\u2019s goal to deepen economic and commercial ties with its neighbor. Last year, Turkey exported more than $9 billion of goods to Iraq.<\/p>\n

\nThe closure of Turkey\u2019s consulates followed Daesh\u2019s seizure of the one in Mosul in June 2014.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nForty-six Turks \u2014 including diplomats, their children and special forces officers \u2014 were taken hostage but were freed three months later.<\/p>\n

\nSoner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Program at the Washington Institute, said the reopening of the consulates is hugely significant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cTurkey lost access to non-Kurdish areas of Iraq around 2010 when it sided with the lobby that lost elections to (former Prime Minister Nouri) Maliki,\u201d Cagaptay told Arab News.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cMaliki\u2019s government shut Turkey out of Iraq, and Turkey\u2019s influence was limited to Kurdish areas, specifically those run by the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party).\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nBut more than a year after Daesh\u2019s military defeat in Iraq, the landscape is changing. \u201cTurkey is coming back into the Sunni Arab heartland in Mosul, where its exit was driven as much by the Al-Maliki government as by the rise of Daesh,\u201d said Cagaptay. \u201cIt\u2019s also now being allowed into the Shiite heartland, the Gulf and the port city of Basra.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nExperts say the reopening of the consulates is linked to the recent improvement in Turkish-Iraqi relations, especially since the Kurdish Regional Government\u2019s (KRG) independence referendum in September 2017, which both Ankara and Baghdad opposed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIt was the beginning of the Ankara-Baghdad spring, which is continuing,\u201d said Cagaptay. \u201cThe reopening of the consulates is a sign of that change, and it\u2019s important that Turkey re-establishes itself and is welcomed again in these cities (Mosul and Basra).\u201d Turkey currently has an embassy in Baghdad and a consulate in Irbil, Iraqi Kurdistan.<\/p>\n

\nGalip Dalay, a visiting scholar at Oxford University and research director at Al-Sharq Forum, said these steps are significant in light of developments in recent years in Iraq, especially the rise and fall of Daesh and the change in the country\u2019s political landscape after the recent election.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cTurkey feels that both the US and Iran\u2019s grip over Iraq might be weakening a bit. This is creating new opportunities for Turkey to exploit in Iraq,\u201d he told Arab News.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nSecondly, Sunni Arabs have always been Turkey\u2019s traditional partner in Iraq, and Ankara wants to further strengthen them, Dalay said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThirdly, Turkey will partly rehabilitate its recently deteriorating relations with Iraqi Kurds. At the same time, it wants to weaken the outlawed PKK\u2019s (Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party) presence in Iraq.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nThis does not mean that Turkey\u2019s security concerns are fading away, but that it feels it can cope with them, Dalay added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANKARA: Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Thursday said his country will soon reopen its consulates in the Iraqi cities of Basra in the south and Mosul in the north, which were closed due to security reasons.\u00a0 During his visit to Iraq to meet with newly appointed President Barham Salih and Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":18291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}