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Turkey plays a dangerous game in Northern Iraq. Economist

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  • Turkey plays a dangerous game in Northern Iraq. Economist

    Turkey plays a dangerous game in Northern Iraq. Economist

    21:30, 21 December, 2012

    YEREVAN, DECEMBER 21, ARMENPRESS: Snaking their way from Kirkuk, a
    city 240 north of Baghdad, through Kurdistan and across Turkey's
    eastern region of Anatolia to the Mediterranean are pipes that once
    carried 1.6m barrels a day of Iraqi oil to the global market and
    yielded fat transit fees to Turkey along the way, Armenpress reports
    referring to Economist. The infrastructure underpinned the two
    countries' mutual dependence. But nowadays the balance of power has
    shifted. A third party, the Iraqi Kurds, has changed it. It is unclear
    who will emerge on top. But Iraq's central government in Baghdad is on
    the defensive.

    Wars, saboteurs and, since the 1990s, economic sanctions have left the
    Iraqi sections of the pipeline system in a mess. Barely a fraction of
    its capacity is used. One of the two parallel lines stands empty and
    the source that once fed them, the giant Kirkuk oilfield, is
    dilapidated. The oil ministry in Baghdad has vague ideas about
    revamping the pipeline but Turkey is hatching a different plan for its
    section of the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan pipeline. Its souring relations with
    the government in Baghdad have spurred it to cultivate new ties with
    the Iraqi Kurds' regional government in Erbil, which oversees the oil
    and gas that Turkey's growing economy craves. A wide-ranging energy
    deal is in the works that will see state-backed Turkish firms and
    Western oil majors plough money into Kurdish infrastructure and
    oilfields, connecting them to Turkey and the world beyond. The deal
    could eventually allow for up to 2m b/d of Kurdish oil exports to go
    through Turkey. Last year, trade between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan
    amounted to $8 billion. Turkish money has paid for pristine airports
    in Erbil and Dohuk, an Iraqi Kurdish city further north, and for other
    large projects. Not long ago, Turkish politicians, wary of their own
    large and restless Kurdish minority still fight for autonomy in
    eastern Turkey, barely acknowledged Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.

    Now Turkey's government is using its commercial clout to press the
    Iraqi Kurds' president, Masoud Barzani, to help restrain militant
    Kurds within Turkey. A stroke recently suffered by Jalal Talabani, a
    Kurd who is president of federal Iraq and who has often mediated
    between his kinsmen and the rulers in Baghdad may make it even harder
    to keep the calm.

    Oil and gas are at the core of this warm new relationship between
    Turkey and Iraq's Kurds. `Turkey has made a strategic shift in its
    relations with us,' says an official in a ministry in Erbil. `Whatever
    the scenario, our market is in Turkey,' writes the Economist.

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