Türkiye and Iraq have agreed to a gradual transfer of Ankara's military base in Bashiqa to Baghdad, resolving a sovereignty dispute that has festered since 2015. The announcement came after Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday. The deal is a classic bilateral swap: Türkiye gets what it wants on the PKK front — Iraq commits to fully establishing state authority in Sinjar and ending the presence of outlawed foreign armed elements — while Iraq recovers control of a base it has called a violation of sovereignty since up to 600 Turkish soldiers were deployed there in December 2015. The base was originally established through an agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government, not Baghdad, to train local forces fighting ISIL. The Sinjar component is the load-bearing clause. The mountainous region in northern Iraq has served as a staging area for PKK fighters for years, and Turkish cross-border operations there were a recurring source of tension. Those operations eased following a landmark peace process between Ankara and the PKK in 2025, creating the political space for this agreement. Beyond security, the two sides agreed to expand bilateral trade and investment, implement signed agreements immediately, and accelerate joint strategic projects — particularly the Development Road project, a planned transport corridor linking the Gulf to Europe via Iraq and Türkiye. This is the commercial glue holding the deal together: both capitals need the corridor to generate economic returns that justify the political concessions. Wednesday's accord caps months of effort by Baghdad to consolidate state authority over northern flashpoints. For al-Zaidi's government, this is a sovereignty win that plays domestically. For Erdogan, it formalizes what the 2025 peace process already implied — that Türkiye's military footprint in northern Iraq can shrink as the PKK threat diminishes through political rather than kinetic means. The structural question is whether Iraq can actually deliver on Sinjar. Establishing federal authority in a region with overlapping Kurdish, Yazidi, and militia claims requires sustained political will and security capacity that Baghdad has historically struggled to project into its northern periphery. If Sinjar drifts back toward a security vacuum, the entire deal's logic unravels. The Development Road project is the long-term tell. If construction accelerates, this agreement becomes a genuine pivot toward trade-corridor diplomacy in the region. If it stalls — as mega-infrastructure projects in this neighborhood often do — the deal remains a diplomatic gesture with a limited shelf life.
