How a resurgent Turkey is seizing power from Russia and Europe

Sunsets over Kurdistan get caught in the air pollution. Their rays fracture against fine particulate matter, dampening them so that the light dims into a sleepy haze. Like many other things in the mountains of northern Iraq, it becomes part of the background.

It’s worse south of Erbil, where the oil refineries belch out black smoke into the horizon. Spiteful black clouds rise up from the flares in a dust storm of smoke, hovering over the Neo-Sumerian minarets as though plotting their descent. But like the many forces which have surrounded the city, from the Assyrians to the Romans to the Americans to ISIS, they come and they go.

But recently, its hazy skies were lit up not by the setting sun, but by missile fire.

On March 13, a volley of missiles hit the US consulate in Erbil, northern Iraq. No one was killed in the volley, which shook the nearby studios of TV channel Kurd24. But in the wreckage, few outlets reported that the house of a lesser-known businessman was also damaged.

In fact, the majority of the 12 missiles didn’t hit the US consulate at all, but instead damaged a villa owned by Baz Karim Barzanji, CEO of the KAR Group—an oil company that operates in the Kurdistan region.

The KAR Group, a Kurdish engineering firm, is only one of the oil firms operating in Kurdistan—but it is closely tied with the politics of the region.

Iran said it was targeting Mossad bases in Erbil, but when approached on the KAR Group question told the news agency that the attack was a ‘multi-purposed message to many people and groups’, adding that whatever Israel was planning ‘will not materialise’.

Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, talks took place between US and Israeli officials to discuss exporting Kurdish oil to Europe through Turkey, as an alternative to Russian supplies.

The Kurdistan Play

The KAR Group is said to be working to develop the gas export pipeline, according to Reuters, in the hopes of easing the continent away from reliance on Russian gas — something which the group denies.

Such a deal would cut out Iran, which has been pinning its hopes on using its oil as a bargaining chip to loosen the grip of US sanctions on its economy.

As a response, Iran has allegedly been trying to intimidate the KAR Group into backing down from the talks, with several missiles striking a villa owned by KAR Group CEO Baz Karim Barzanji on March 13.

A weaker, more dysfunctional Kurdistan means a stronger Iran—with the latter looking to intimidate the KAR Group into backing away from the US-Turkey-Israel agreement.

With tensions escalating between Iran and Western powers, the US and its allies have been looking at Turkey as a regional power broker, using it to supply oil to Europe in a bid to wean off dependence on Russian oil and gas.

Turkey has a tempestuous relationship with Kurdistan. On the one hand, it prefers to keep the oil-rich region autonomous and outside the reach of Iran, a regional rival, but on the other - it wants to destroy any hiding place for members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), against which it has been waging a brutal war within Turkey for over forty years.

The Kurdistan Region is becoming more strategically important as a result, signaling a green light to further oil exploration across the region.

The Russian state-owned oil companies, in particular, have hoisted up the Kurdistan Region’s economy. Rosneft began pouring billions into the region in 2017 after securing exploration contracts, and purchasing 60% of the Kirkuk–Ceyhan Oil Pipeline, an oil export system reaching over almost a thousand kilometres to connect the Region with Turkey.

Almost every oil field in the Region has a 20% stake held by the KRG, which negotiates its own oil contracts, overseen by sitting prime minister Masrour Barzani — part of the family which has ruled the region for decades.

Through an anonymous Delaware company, property documents show that the prime minister purchased a Miami villa worth $18.3 million in 2019, according to American Prospect magazine.

Where could the prime minister have gotten such funds, one wonders? Considering he was recently accused of bribing Iraqi regulators by paying them with London homes, it is curious where he found the spare capital.

The Kurdistan Region's existence as an autonomous state is under threat from a ruling earlier this year by the Iraqi federal court, questioning its legitimacy in negotiating its own oil contracts, which it uses to sell oil through the Kirkuk–Ceyhan Oil pipeline.

If the KRG were an independent country, the amount of oil and gas reserves would place it among the top 10 oil-rich countries in the world. But federal Iraq is seeking to bring the autonomous region, and its oil contracts, back under the control of its national company, the State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO).

For its part, Turkey prefers to keep the oil-rich region autonomous and outside the reach of Iran, a regional rival, but it also seeks to destroy any hiding place for members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), against which it has been waging a brutal war within Turkey for over forty years.

The Region has suffered airstrikes and missile attacks from its northern neighbour in recent months, leaving the country caught between regional power brokers.

In Operation Claw-Lock, Turkey aims to eliminate the PKK leadership, launching an incursion into the Region’s northern mountainous areas once again in recent months, in a move that would arguably also shore up its oil interests.

Shortly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the KAR group signed an agreement to expand a natural gas pipeline to Duhok for domestic production, later adding that the pipeline would be extended to Turkey.

Following Europe’s scramble for alternative energy suppliers, Prime Minister Barzani stated in March that Kurdish gas would ultimately be exported to Europe, speaking at the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Forum in Dubai.

PKK-affiliated groups have previously claimed responsibility for attacking the Ceyhan - Kirkuk, with Turkey likely viewing the elimination of the PKK leadership as vital in light of the renewed interests in its oil exports.

As the irrigation empires of ancient Babylon and Assyria used water as a weapon to subjugate their enemies in times of war, so too has Iraq found itself subservient to an upstream neighbour.

I saw Iraq’s trees withered by the shores of the Tigris as trucks rolled over the dirt beside me after a short drive over from Erbil. Locals told Rough Estimate they could see dead fish floating in the oil on a particularly hot day when the water levels had receded.

Iraq has a history of deforestation. During the Iran-Iraq war, millions of date palms were cut down for military purposes. Turkey has been cutting off water to Kurdistan for years to enforce political pressure, lowering the banks of the Tigris and withering the surrounding vegetation.

Kurdistan exists in political limbo as an autonomous state, surviving thanks to its ability to sell oil, a huge portion of which goes through the Kirkuk–Ceyhan Oil Pipeline to Turkey.

Kurdistan, one energy security deal short of a state, has become stuck between two regional players, Turkey and Iran. A sandwich nation, completed by its opposing sides.

But it’s not the only nation making up the smorgasbord of countries gasping for air beneath the geopolitical shockwave which the Russo-Ukrainian war started.

The Azerbaijan Play

Georgia and Armenia, Orthodox Christian nations that historically balance themselves between Russia and Turkey, find the seesaw catapulting them in one direction only as the Kremlin’s buffer zone shrinks.

In Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi’s book The Thirty Year Genocide (2019), the chronical documents Ottoman emissaries rewarding Kurdish militias for systematically killing, torturing and subjugating

The Ottoman Empire had a long tradition of turning one minority against the other, forcibly recruiting soldiers and bureaucrats from among the children of their Balkan Christian subjects—a practice known as Devshirme.

Its most fierce troops, the Janissaries that served as the Sultan’s household troops, were harvested from the child levy.

Now, the Kurds find themselves the largest minority in Turkey, a country which has dedicated the last part of the last 40 years to eradicating any attempt for Kurds to save their own national identity within the state.

The Armenian Genocide may be the only historical event where its documentation is inversely proportional to its denial. Photos of Armenians hung in the streets of Istanbul, for example, is a proof the prosecutors at Nuremberg would have begged to obtain for the German equivalent.

Of the five million Christians that lived within the Ottoman empire in the late 19th century, two million had been murdered by its turn. The scholars argue that the Hamidian massacres, the Armenian genocide, Assyrian genocide, and Greek genocide should be understood as a single event, an attempt to eradicate Christianity from the region.

That attempt, Armenians told me on the streets of Yerevan, is still ongoing.

In September 2020 on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, fire began to rain down from the skies in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh are de facto under control of Azerbaijan, a left-over territorial oversight from the days it was ruled by the Soviet Union - but the region in fact houses an Armenian ethnic majority which has never been given the right of self-determination.

The Armenian army, arriving at the border, found themselves not firing across the border - but up at the skies.

Conventional forces were quickly scattered, and its tanks were eviscerated, forcing Armenia to concede in a rapid escalation.

Now, Armenians on the border find themselves living in the Caucus’s equivalent of the West Bank—occupied by a foreign power but unable to leverage their own autonomy.

The army was not fighting soldiers, but drones, the same Bayraktar TB2 drones Turkey would use against Russian weaponry in Syria, Libya—and later, in Ukraine.

But why was Azerbaijan using Turkish drones? What Cambodia is to China, Azerbaijan is to Turkey. The country, unlike its neighbour Armenia, never adopted a functioning democracy.

In fact, its president—who has been in power for the better part of three decades - is part of the authoritarian Aliyev family, which retains a tight grip on the country through the suppression of human rights, free speech, and independent markets.

Much of this was forgotten because of the Southern Gas Corridor, the largest energy project the EU is currently pursuing together with Baku.

EU officials took money from Azerbaijani officials seeking to promote their own reputation across the continent and secure lucrative kickbacks. That, more than anything else, stops the country from ending up on the list of most sanctions lists and international human rights groups.

In 2021, it was revealed that three children and two close associates of Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev used secretive offshore companies to acquire luxurious penthouses, commercial office space, and even an old tavern in the heart of London.

Leaked documents from the Pandora Papers reveal how these properties were held by an interconnected network of 84 offshore companies.

It has been reported that the Aliyevs own millions in property abroad. But this fortune dwarfs their previously known holdings in the United Kingdom — and the newly obtained records shed light on the complex offshore mechanisms that allow it to remain a secret.

Replacing Russian oil and gas for Azerbaijani imports is a cradled ambition of Europe’s. But the continent may be trading one master for another.

Look no further than Georgia, now rushing to become an EU candidate, to the political bloc’s ambitions of shoring up its reach.

Few countries are anticipating a simultaneous Russian invasion on two fronts, and so Georgia serves as an effective buffer for caucuses, Turkey, and by extension—the EU.

The solidification of political barriers around Russia all goes towards safeguarding European oil interests, and by proxy Turkey’s close-monopoly of the European oil and gas supply.

Turkey was the first nation to recognise Azerbaijan’s independence in 1991, when the leader of the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan, Abulfaz Elchibey, called himself ‘Ataturk’s soldier’ and defended the idea of uniting Turkey and Azerbaijan in a confederation.

The ambition has come closer to succeeding than many realise. In effect, the nations share a military, as well as national ambitions.

The Qatar Play

Qatar isn’t happy with the West. From its point of view, western countries spent the last three decades telling rich Arab gulf nations how bad they should feel for relying on oil and gas to prop up their autocratic regimes.

But now, with Russia forcing many countries to reconsider a fossil fuel future, Western nations don’t seem to be feeling so smug about themselves.

In an interview with the UK’s Sky News, Qatar’s energy minister Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi said leaders had for years ‘demonised’ oil and gas companies and turned them into ‘the bad guys’.

As a result European countries don’t have enough investment in the oil and gas sector, he said, speaking in the context of their reliance on Russian and oil gas.

Now, Qatar is demanding European countries sign a 20-year contract to import liquified natural gas (LNG), locking them into buying oil and gas until 2042.

In short, Qatar is telling Europe to forget about reaching net zero any time soon, or else it can go knocking on Russia’s door for its oil and gas supplies.

The Gulf state finds itself in a strong negotiating position while other alternatives take longer to come to fruition, exacerbating regional conflicts over energy.

The Libya Play

Libya is a geopolitical mess. After the first civil war was brought about by allied bombing of forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, a second has emerged from the rubble. Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Russia all have mercenaries and air forces active in the conflict.

The country has become a test case for what geopolitical conflicts look like without direct involvement from one of the world’s two major powers, the US and China. While both have interests within the region, the conflict is for the most part a regional one complicated by the discovery of oil off the coast of Cyprus.

Since the first civil war, a conflict has erupted between the UN-backed sitting government and one of Gaddafi’s former generals who helped overthrow him: Khalifa Haftar, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War and US citizen who spent several years in exile in Virginia before returning to his home country.

He has fought against every significant faction in Libya’s regional conflicts, including his time spent as a POW during the Libya-Chad conflict, with unrivalled military experience.

Haftar’s loyalists are slowly overrunning the Libyan parliament, eroding the support for the UN-backed government, according to the Washington Post.

The second Libyan civil war saw Haftar’s forces pitted against the General National Congress, supported by the UN’s peacekeeping mission.

The UAE, opposed to political Islam, wants an authoritarian dictatorship in Libya that will stamp out any and all forms of Islamism, putting it at odds with Qatar and Turkey who support Haftar’s Libyan National Army.

Foreign Policy reported two years earlier that since April 4, 2019, Abu Dhabi has conducted more than 850 drone and jet strikes on Haftar’s behalf.

A Libyan government loyal to Russia would allow Putin to build military bases in north Africa capable of surrounding Europe.

Putin began trying to tip the balance in a civil war, as he did in Syria, sending the Wagner Group into the war-torn country to support Haftar in 2019.

While Russia has been pulling out some troops throughout Africa to aid its war in Ukraine, Italy’s Nova News agency reported in May that at least 1,500 to 2,000 Wagner Group mercenaries are still in Libya after dozens were transferred to fight in Ukraine, multiple sources told Italy's Nova news agency.

France, meanwhile, has maintained a large military presence in its former colonies. The nation, which derives 70% of its energy from nuclear power, relies on Uranium mines located around Africa to prevent disruption at home.

Since the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests from 2018-2020 showed that French citizens were not willing to increase energy costs, the French government was left with a problem.

In 2014, France invaded Mali when the government fell to a Jihadist group, a military action which culminated in French deployments all over north Africa.

Ever since the Algerian government elected an anti-French president in 2019 who threatened to cease cooperation with France and disrupt the uranium trade, France shifted its policy to no longer support democracy in North Africa.

Two recent coups in Mali and instability in Niger have hardened its view on democracy in the region, particularly considering that three out of four light bulbs in France are illuminated through Nigerien uranium.

France’s view is that it simply cannot afford the instability that comes with democracy in north Africa, finding itself backing Haftar as what it views to be the main stabilising force in the region

The French policy puts the country in the uncomfortable position of supporting military action against the UN-mandated government in Libya.

But the dynamics became even more complex with the discovery of natural gas reserves in the Levantine Basin in the Mediterranean Sea, about half-way between Israel and Cyprus.

Shortly before the discovery of the gas reserves, Turkey had signed a Maritime Boundary Treaty to claim rights to ocean bed resources along the Mediterranean Sea with the government of Libya.

The maritime corridor passes straight through where the gas reserves were discovered, as it happens.

Tim Marshal’s book The Power of Geography (2021) details how Turkey intends to prop up its claims to the natural gas reserves by militarily propping up the Libyan government.

As long as the government in Libya survives, Turkey is able to press its claim to the natural gas reserves which, under international law, fall within the territory of Cyprus.

Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, annexing the northern part of its territory into a separate state that only Turkey recognises.

As an extension of its claim over Cyprus, Turkey also claims ownership of the gas reserves now intended to be pumped into the Eastern Mediterranean pipeline and out to Europe.

In January 2021, the Greek parliament passed a law to extend the breadth of Greece's territorial waters in the Ionian Sea from six nautical miles to 12, allowing it to dictate what route Turkish vessels take in between its islands, further antagonising the country.

The dispute emboldened Turkey to flood Libya with its mercenaries in order to prop up the beleaguered UN government, with Greece and Israel supporting the other side along with France and Russia.

While the EastMed pipeline appears as though it will be constructed, the dispute has come perilously close to pitting one NATO member against another.

A tentative ceasefire is currently in place between all major factions, though elections are stalled and whether peace can last remains to be seen.

The New Ottomans

Turkey has long been the black sheep of the NATO family. But while things were not looking so good for Ankara a few months before the invasion of Ukraine, it soon found itself as the go-between for Putin and the West.

By supplying cheap drones to Ukraine, selectively supporting Western sanctions, but sitting down with Russian leaders whenever possible, Turkey has been effective at playing off NATO against Russia.

And with Europe looking for a new energy supplier, Turkey finally sees its chance to become king maker.

The US is unlikely to prevent its advance. The Pentagon’s military strategy in the Middle East has long been to suction the Islamic Republic into the US-shaped hole left wider

because of a contradictory policy of supporting Arab Nationalism. Particularly in places like Egypt, as a means of resisting Soviet influence, while at the same time relying on British influence in its former colonies to maintain stability.

Similarly, the Carter doctrine is all but dead. The US in practice agreed to supply any Gulf state with weapons to defend itself following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, but after Syria, none of America’s allies believed in its Cold War commitment.

Starting with the Suez Crisis, the US made clear that it would not allow former imperialist nations to enforce their national interests in the Persian Gulf, particularly when - with an election for Eisenhower around the corner - military action did not align with US interest, however short term those might be.

Such a policy made little sense when US foreign policy also required Britain and France to maintain influence in the region. It is now surprise in hindsight that the Cold War marked a final loosening of the grip that former imperialist nations had over the region, and left a gap into which first then Soviets and the US, now Iran and Turkey are stepping.

Syria was particularly damaging to the alliance because it alienated France from NATO, leaving it isolated with the feeling it was left to contend with the destruction in the Middle East alone.

With the US stepping back, Turkey is stepping in. The country is renewing its troop deployments in Iraq and Libya, sending forces for a further 18 months in a recent announcement.

Emboldened by the retreat of Russia, it is expected to cement its hold on northern Iraq, splitting the country between federal Iraq, where Iran is increasing political influence, and Kurdistan, which is becoming more reliant on its northerly neighbour.

The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia is likely to flare up in the not-so-distant future as Turkey feels increasingly emboldened to reinstate the ‘Turkish corridor’ that marked the days of the Ottoman empire and is viewed by many in the Erdogan administration as a means of ensuring Turkish security.

In Libya, much depends on the success of the delayed elections and whether the ceasefire holds, though Turkey is unlikely to win out in its legal battle over the EastMed pipeline.

Iran acquiring nuclear weapons could well shift Turkey’s focus away from Europe and North Africa, however, forcing it to commit more troops to the Middle East.

Highlighting its Ottoman ambitions, there have been signs that Turkey may turn to a hundred-year old contract in order to enforce border disputes against its former vassal states: The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923.

Several countries - such as Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Egypt and Sudan, Syria and Iraq - owe their modern borders in part to the agreements made under the Treaty of Lausanne, signed at a time when the Ottoman empire was on the decline and conceding much of its territory to an expanding Russian Empire.

Turkey has already evoked the treaty over a dispute with Greece in April 2020, accusing it of violating its terms by keeping troops on the islands of the eastern Aegean.

With Russia on the decline, the same process may occur in reverse. The treaty expires in 2023, opening the door for Turkey to argue that several of the states which formerly made up the territory of the Ottoman empire are no longer legitimate.

As I walked from the coffee houses of Istanbul to the Hagia Sophia, instructed to take my shoes off upon being told that the church-turned-museum had now been converted into a mosque, a resurgent and hyper-nationalist Turkey was not difficult to imagine.

For the rest of the Middle East, Turkey will act as gatekeeper and extract a heavy price for any oil and gas pipelines to be expanded into Europe.

While the war in Ukraine drags on, geopolitical choices are being made quickly. But while European nations scramble to escape the influence of Russia, western leaders should be careful not to trade a Czar for a Sultan.

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