Unity Between Turkey and Kurds Grows

Posted by Spencer Ackerman, Attackerman at 7:00 AM on June 2, 2008.

According to Iraqi Crisis Report, Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds are engaging in a surreptitious, finance-driven rapprochement:

Gocalb Salshik, a Turkish engineer with Tapa Company, which is building the new 260 million US dollar University of Sulaimaniyah campus, welcomes greater cooperation, which he said would benefit business in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan.

“We tried to import materials into the region through the Turkish border and have been denied several times because of the tensions between Turkey and Kurdistan region,” said Salshik.


“It is very important for us that Turkey and Kurds have the best relations [possible] because we can invest more in the region.”


Fareed Assasard, head of Kurdistan Strategic Studies Centre, a think-tank linked to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, PUK, agreed….


“The Kurdistan region needs Turkey in order to get a foothold in the Middle East,” said Assasard. “Until now, many Turks and other Middle Eastern [countries] consider Kurdistan an alien entity that might damage the region” by breaking from Iraq, he added.

Yet, while Zakho highlights Kurdistan’s precarious economic and diplomatic situation, it also holds the solution to both those problems. Last November, a small Norwegian company known as DNO began drilling just outside Zakho, and, on December 22, it struck oil. But, much to the consternation of Baghdad, the oil that emerges from Zakho will benefit not Iraq as a whole, but Kurdistan specifically. Article 109 of the Iraqi constitution calls for distributing oil and gas revenue between the regional administrations and the federal government–but that joint ownership only holds for “current fields,” not new ones like Zakho. The Kurdistan Development Corporation estimates that Kurdistan possesses about 45 billion barrels of oil reserves, putting its oil potential on par with that of petro-giants like Nigeria. “Its prospectivity is beyond doubt,” says Micael Gulbenkian, the chairman of the Canadian-based Heritage Oil Corporation, which has signed agreements with Kurdistan to develop a 300-square-kilometer field near Taqtaq and is negotiating for more. “Just extrapolate on the basis of the Kirkuk fields to understand the potential of that region.” (Those fields are family history to Gulbenkian: Calouste was his great-uncle.)

The Kurds see that wealth as their ticket to independence. “We have to improve [the economy], especially with our oil, so then we can declare our freedom. Here, unlike in the rest of Iraq, it’s secure, so Western countries come and invest, especially in oil, and so we will develop our economy,” explains Dejar Ghafoud, a senior official in Kurdistan’s interior ministry. “And, within ten to 15 years of federalism, the culture of the Arabs, Persians, and Turks will change”–that is, they will become more accepting of independence.


That’s not infeasible. The Kurds have signed deals like the one with DNO with at least a half-dozen corporations. These include the Turkish oil companies Petoil and Genel Elektrik, both of which have contracts to develop oil and gas fields in the east. As Turkish companies come to view Kurdistan as a lucrative investment opportunity, the thinking goes, the Turkish government won’t want to do anything bad for business–or for its aspiration to join the European Union–like invading an independent Kurdistan or shutting down Zakho’s border crossing. “Turks are democratic people. Turks know the importance of self-rule,” says Ilnur Ceاvik, a preternaturally sunny Turkish businessman. “In time, as things develop here, they will also develop in Turkey. We will develop a more positive look at Kurdistan.”

Tagged as: iraq, economy, turkey, kurdistan