Under US pressure, Turkey focuses on relations with Baghdad
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu signaled Turkey's intentions of switching diplomatic tracks during his Baghdad visit.
The visit of Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to Baghdad, three years after the 2011 visit of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has to be seen as a new start between the two countries.
This visit may well signal a serious changing of tracks of Turkish diplomacy, which under Erdogan and then-Foreign Minister Davutoglu was perceived as a Sunni-oriented neo-Ottoman Middle East policy. The New York Times wrote that Davutoglu had shown in this visit that he has abandoned his passion for a “Sunni axis.”
Only when the price of this diplomacy turned out to be “regional and global isolation” did Turkey become aware of the need to switch tracks. Although government quarters tried to justify the point Turkey had reached as “dignified loneliness,” they found out that they had to face Middle Eastern reality.
Davutoglu’s visit, which came three months after the formation of a new Iraqi government under Haider al-Abadi, was also on the heels of major steps to sort out the problems between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Baghdad.
