Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu met with Iraqi Kurdish leaders today on the last leg of an ambitious visit to Iraq, in which the Turkish diplomat unveiled plans to reopen consulates in Mosul and Basra and to establish new ones in Kirkuk and Najaf. Cavusoglu also announced that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would pay a formal visit to Iraq before the year's end.

The timing of the two-day tour, which took Cavusoglu from Baghdad to Basra and finally Erbil, prompted speculation that Turkey was turning to its oil-rich neighbor for help after the US administration announced it was ending waivers that allowed a clutch of countries including Turkey to continue buying oil from Iran effective May 2.

Last week Cavusoglu railed against the sanctions, saying, “We don’t accept unilateral sanctions and impositions on the issue of how we will establish relations with our neighbors.” 

Getting around the sanctions will be tough if not impossible because taking delivery of Iranian oil regardless of how it's paid for will be deemed sanctionable by Washington.