A recent dispute between Ankara, Erbil, and Baghdad is only the latest in a long history of contentious episodes between Turkey and the Kurds. This moment, like so many before it, sees Turkey using the age old carrot and stick approach. 

Turkey has been embroiled in a decades-long conflict with Kurdish separatists. Whether it manifests as a counter-insurgency within Turkey’s borders, or an invasion of Northern Syria, home to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), depends on the political situation of the time. It is essential that while one Kurdish authority draws Turkish fire, the other draws its investment; the Iraqis get the carrot, the Syrians get the stick. 

Ankara’s relationship with Iraq’s Kurds is often overlooked. It is a very different partnership than that between the Turkey and the Syrian Kurds Turkish state and the Kurds within its own borders: Here we see the much more carrot than stick. 

The most recent incident of the dispute to make headlines is the contention over oil exports from Iraqi Kurdistan. Until March 25 this year, Turkey was moving 450,000 barrels per day o through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline from. This was brought to an end by an arbitration ruling by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which ordered Ankara to pay Baghdad damages of around $1.5 billion over unauthorised exports carried out by the Kurdistan Regional Government between 2014 and 2018. 

The crux of the issue was that exporters based in Iraqi Kurdistan, many of them foreign nationals, were selling oil through Turkey at a cheaper rate than the Iraqi government allows. Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have profited greatly from a direct partnership, circumventing Iraq’s central government. Exporters in Kurdistan are demanding Baghdad makes up for their losses. What happens next is anyone’s guess. 

The saga demonstrates Ankara’s rather more pragmatic attitude toward the Iraqi Kurds than it takes towards those inNorthern Syria, and arguably those within Turkeys’ borders as well. It reveals a wider strategy to pursue deeper relations with the KRG. According to Sarwar Kamal, KRG’s Deputy Trade Minister, over half of foreign companies operating in Northern Iraq are Turkish. Annual Turkish exports to Iraq are worth $20 billion.

Where Iraqi Kurdistan is concerned, Turkey consistently opts for diplomacy — even going so far as to organise a visit by the deputy head of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization to Sulaymaniyah. The visit was an attempt to smooth things over with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan following Turkish airstrikes in North-Eastern Iraq. While Turkey does maintain military bases in the area and does carry out military operations against Iraqi Kurdish targets, it is far more restrained than in its dealings with Kurds elsewhere.

One key reason for this is Iran, Turkey’s long-time regional rival. The pair have been divided by centuries of direct competition under their former imperial flags, by the Sunni-Shia divide, by their differing attitudes towards the West and the regional status quo, and by their internal political systems. While it gets fewer column inches than the war in Gaza, or flashy investments in the Gulf states, the Turkey-Iran rivalry remains a defining feature of Middle Eastern politics.

Both Turkey and Iran are revanchists in their own way. Iran has gradually developed its control over Iraq since the US invasion turned the country on its head, and its relationships with proxy fighting forces in the region are well documented.

Turkey too has proxies, such as the Syrian National Army and its tens of thousands of fighters. It also extends a degree of protection to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, occasionally calling on them to assist in anti-Kurdish operations. But in Iraq, the problem is more complicated and warrants a more subtle approach from Ankara. Dislodging Iran from Iraq is an unlikely prospect, but Turkish overtures into the region — not least its multi-billion-dollar partnership with the KRG over oil exports — continue to drive a wedge between Erbil and Baghdad, weakening the central government through the loss of oil significant oil revenues and a diluting of its control over a large part of its territory.

Given that Baghdad is increasingly influenced by Tehran, Turkish involvement in Northern Iraq makes sense: Not only does the relationship with Kurdish authorities in Iraq provide it a foothold in the country that is both geographically and strategically central in controlling the Middle East; it also serves to further divide the Kurds across the region.

The KRG’s involvement with Turkey sets it at odds with Syrian Kurds in Rojava, who find themselves more and more embroiled with Turkey and its Syrian proxies. The presence of two newly and unusually autonomous Kurdish authorities in Iraq and Syria posed a real risk to Turkey’s security and its regional ambitions. 

While other intra-Kurdish factors play a greater role in dividing the Kurdish people, there is no doubt that Turkish involvement further exacerbates divisions among the Kurds. Ensuring differences between Turkish groups proliferate is in Turkey’s interests, including in relation to its growing rivalry with Iran. It is a classic case of divide and rule. Crucial to maintaining the rift between Iraqi and Syrian Kurds is continuing to give Erbil the carrot and Rojava the stick.