Firas Elias – researcher
The formation process of Iraqi prime minister Mohammed Shia Al- Sudani came to represent a new station in the relationship between Iraq and Turkey, since the changing that happened in Iraq after 2003, there was a state of instability in the political and security area, which reflected in both countries relationship, the Sudani government will find itself forced to deal with many files that the successive Iraqi governments have failed to solve it with turkey side, Although the Iraqi failure to reach decisive results with Turkey in these files stems mainly from the political instability that the country is going through, on the other hand, the Turkish insistence on not solving them made Iraq face important obstacles, which in turn presents an important question centered on the ability of the Sudani government to resolve these unresolved files with the Turkish side.
This study tries to highlight the Turkish dealing with the formation of Sudani government and the most important unresolved file and how the Sudani government will deal with turkey, and it reflects in general on the future of Turkish and Iraqi relations in the next period
Turkish dealing with the process of forming the Sudani government
There is no doubt that Turkey – like other regional powers neighboring Iraq – has a clear area of influence inside Iraq, and the area of influence can be clearly felt in the role it has played by pushing the sovereignty alliance led by the current Speaker of the parliament Muhammad Al-Halbousi and Khamis Al-Khanjar, in addition to its good relations with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, to agree with ITAR, to form the new Iraqi government, and end the political stalemate that Iraq went through after the early elections that took place. On October 10, 2021.
Turkey tried – through the movements of its ambassador to Iraq, rieza Konai, in addition to the repeated visits of the head of Turkish intelligence Hakan Fidan – to enter directly on the line of formation of the Iraqi government, driven by internal needs and external fears that the continued state of political stalemate experienced by Iraq would lead to further military attrition, whether at the level of confrontation with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Sinjar, or at the level of Turkish military operations on the Iraqi and Syrian sides. Turkish forces have many attacks with drones and Katyusha rockets, and the attack that took place in the Burkh resort of Dohuk province in the Kurdistan region last July, which killed and wounded many people, put relations between the two countries at a dangerous juncture.
This attack led to the escalation of Iraqi popular discontent with the role played by Turkey in Iraq, and more than that, this attack led Iraq to resort to the UN Security Council to condemn the Turkish bombing, and to hold Turkey responsible for the losses suffered by Iraq, and the Iraqi responses did not stop there, but popular demands emerged to boycott Turkish goods, and the Turkish consulate in Nineveh province was subjected to missile attacks, in addition to Turkish military headquarters in Zlikan, Bamerni, and others.
This decision was preceded by the Federal Court in February 2022, which ruled that the oil and gas law in the Kurdistan region is unconstitutional, which deals in part with gas transactions between Erbil and Ankara, in addition to the decrease in the volume of trade exchange between the two countries due to the political crisis that the country went through, which made the Turkish interior suffer from the escalation of the economic crisis, as the outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis, and the continuation of economic sanctions on Iran, increased the dependence of the Turkish side on trade and energy transactions with Iraq, which is This, in turn, has accumulated the complications that Turkey has witnessed in the face of the continuing state of political differences in Iraq.
