CAIRO, Sept 23 (Reuters) – Turkey and Iraq agreed on Wednesday for Turkish forces to hand over a military camp in northern Iraq to the Iraqi government gradually, they said after talks in New York, adding they also agreed to end the presence of “outlawed armed elements” in northern Iraq.
After Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the sides said in a joint statement they had agreed to deepen security cooperation.
“Within this framework, they reached an agreement on fully establishing state authority in Sinjar and ending the presence of outlawed foreign armed elements,” they said, referring to Kurdish militants, some of whom are based in the mountainous Sinjar area of northern Iraq.
Turkey is continuing a peace process that it hopes will result in the disarmament of those militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and end a decades-old conflict.
The statement on Wednesday added that “in accordance with the agreed-upon mechanism and timeline” and security measures taken by Iraq, Turkish forces would gradually hand over the Bashiqa-Zelikan base, a military installation in northern Iraq near Mosul, to the Iraqi government.
An Iraqi military commander familiar with the talks said the phased withdrawal of Turkish troops from the Bashiqa camp and another small base near Mosul was expected to be completed by the end of this year. There was no immediate comment from Turkey on the timeline.
Ankara deployed troops near Mosul in 2015, saying they were there to train and protect Iraqi forces and local Sunni Arab, Turkmen and Kurdish fighters preparing to fight Islamic State, which seized Mosul in 2014.
The deployment sparked a dispute with Baghdad, which demanded the troops’ withdrawal, while Ankara said they were supporting the anti-Islamic State training mission. Turkey still has several bases in the region, which it says are there to protect Turkey’s national security.
Tom Barrack, US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria and Iraq, welcomed the move, saying “Iraqi sovereignty and Turkish security, both (were) served” by it.
The joint statement said the two leaders also discussed bilateral ties and trade, stressing the need to urgently implement previously signed agreements and speed up “strategic projects.”
(Reporting by Yomna Ehab and Menna Alaa El-Din in Cairo, Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara, and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Cynthia Osterman)
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