Ankara wants to flirt with both Arbil and Baghdad
“You know, they call this place Kurdistan,” said the businessman from Turkey whom I met on an Arbil–Istanbul flight, as I kept referring to the region as “northern Iraq.”
Old habits die hard. Interestingly enough, while the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) image that it would shed some old habits in the sphere of fundamental rights and freedoms has been short-lived; the one place that remains an area where the ruling party can quickly kill old habits is the economic sphere. There is no red line for the AKP if economic gain is in the picture. That’s why the AKP government has fast reversed Turkey’s old paranoia about the possibility of the creation of an independent state by Iraqi Kurds.
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