There is an easy way to read Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to host Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al Zaidi in Ankara on July 28, and to call the visit “historic”: as an energy story, a pipeline story, a story about barrels and stakes. That reading is not wrong, but simply incomplete.
For two decades, Turkey’s dealings with Baghdad focused on strategizing against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — a separatist Kurdish entity intent on seceding territory from Turkey, conducting cross-border raids, and maintaining a network of bases holding no fewer than 4,000 Turkish troops across Erbil, Duhok, and Nineveh. That narrow, security-first relationship is being folded into something much more expansive, and Iraq’s Kurds are not reassured: a courtship of Baghdad, quietly encouraged by Washington’s own envoy Tom Barrack, to the region is widely felt in Kurdish circles to come at their expense.
None of this is happening in isolation. It fits a template Ankara has been running since 2024: rapprochement with Cairo, a defense framework with Riyadh, and coordination with Islamabad that a growing number of analysts now describe as an emergent Sunni-majority bloc. Erdogan has paired that outreach with a two-decade buildup across Africa, where Turkey’s embassy count has nearly quadrupled since 2002, and drone sales, military academies, and scholarships have built the kind of durable loyalty a single arms contract cannot. Iraq, hoping to leverage its geographic position as an economic and trade asset rather than a security liability, is eager to engage. And Washington, intending to wrest Iraq from Iran’s sphere of influence, is eager to support an expanded relationship between Baghdad and Ankara.
Aside from Kurdish issues, Iraq’s historic importance centers on oil, including the over-50-year agreement that governs oil exports via the Iraq-Turkey Pipeline, which transports crude from Kirkuk to Turkey’s Mediterranean Ceyhan port. The pipeline is Iraq’s primary alternative to the Persian Gulf, which usually carries more than 90% of Iraq’s oil exports.
Shortly after Zaidi’s visit, Baghdad and Ankara reached a one-year extension on the ITP agreement, which expired on July 27. The interim deal enables exports of up to 750,000 barrels per day, only half of the pipeline’s capacity despite Ankara’s hopes to utilize the pipeline fully. Following Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Iraq’s exports to Ceyhan have not exceeded 200,000 bpd due to production constraints. The two countries are negotiating a broader deal that would encompass a lasting pipeline agreement and a resolution of Ankara’s $1.5 billion arbitration loss for permitting Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region to export oil via the pipeline without Baghdad’s permission.
Erdogan also confirmed that Turkish Petroleum has taken a 15% stake in BP’s Kirkuk redevelopment consortium, a project intended to boost crude production and associated gas capture in major northern Iraqi oil fields.
None of this is incidental. Since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz sharpened the case for alternative export routes, Ankara has pursued Turkey as a corridor bypassing both the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al Mandeb, and equity in the ground gives Turkey a producer’s stake rather than a landlord’s fee.
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Layered atop the pipeline sits the “Iraq Development Road,” a roughly $17 billion rail-and-highway corridor linking Iraq’s Grand Faw port to the Turkish border and onward into Europe, Baghdad’s self-styled “third river.” The project, though launched three years before Zaidi emerged in Baghdad’s political scene, is part of the new prime minister’s vision of Iraq as a regional hub and enables Ankara’s bid to become a key transit state between Asia and the West. Transportation and infrastructure projects related to the Iraq Development Road featured heavily in the five agreements signed during Zaidi’s visit, but not without drama. At one point, Zaidi had to order the minister of transport, Wahab al Hassani, to sign one such deal. Reportedly, Hassani and his allies from Iran-aligned factions in Iraq are concerned that these agreements between Iraq and Turkey could come at the expense of Iran’s status as a regional connection point.
Taken together, the equity stake and the corridor point past a bilateral relationship altogether, toward Erdogan’s real objective: a Turkey positioned not simply as a regional power but a global one — built, in no small part, on the same anti-Israel alignment that led Ankara to suspend trade with Jerusalem in 2024 and now anchors its courtship of Sunni and African capitals alike. While integrating Iraq more deeply with its neighbors to reduce reliance on Iran is an important American objective, Baghdad can’t fall prey to another domineering neighbor.
Sinan Ciddi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he directs the Turkey program.
Bridget Toomey is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on Iranian proxies.