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By Emil Avdaliani
The US involvement in the South Caucasus means that Washington will become increasingly dependent on Turkey to ensure the long-term viability of the corridor through Armenia. The TRIPP not only invites direct American economic and business presence in the South Caucasus but also expands Turkey’s role in the region. The TRIPP agreement will advance Ankara’s commercial and political interests in the South Caucasus and sideline Iran and to a certain extent Russia. The agreement also opens the way for the restoration of ties between Ankara and Yerevan. But the slow progress of the ongoing Armenia-Turkey talks once again demonstrates that the key to normalization lies in a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Credit: PICRYL
BACKGROUND: On August 8 in Washington D.C., Armenia and Azerbaijan reached a landmark arrangement. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a Joint Declaration on Future Relations, pledging to “chart a bright future not bound by past conflict, consistent with the UN Charter.” The historic document stated that the two countries no longer regard each other as enemies. A core component of the Washington deal is the TRIPP, Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, which envisions a transit and trade corridor through Armenia’s southern territory to link Azerbaijan proper with the Nakhchivan enclave. The United States is granted a 99-year mandate to oversee the creation and operation of the transit corridor across Armenian territory.
For Turkey, the TRIPP offers an opportunity to diversify its commercial routes across the South Caucasus. Until now, Turkey enjoyed only one transit route to the Caspian Sea. The corridor through Georgia built in the 1990s, expanded in the 2000s and consisting of roads, railways and pipelines has been an important factor in strengthening Ankara’s relations with Tbilisi. The Georgia route has boomed since February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and the north Eurasian route linking China with the EU became less secure. As a viable alternative, the Middle Corridor running from Turkey and Georgia to Central Asia has become more attractive for global transport companies and actors such as the EU and China.
Yet reliance on one route is fraught with risks. The fickle geopolitical situation in the South Caucasus calls for developing alternatives and the route through Armenia’s southern territory is attractive to Ankara and Baku. Indeed, right after the TRIPP announcement, the Turkish side unveiled the start of construction of the Kars-Iğdır-Aralyk-Dilucu railway line, which will become a key element of the corridor. The project’s cost is up to €2.4 billion and is set to serve as yet another link for China-EU trade. More importantly, it will connect Turkey with the Central Asian market and sideline its competitors in the South Caucasus – Russia and Iran.
IMPLICATIONS: The TRIPP lands Russia and Iran in an uncomfortable position. Iran’s concerns are based on the notion that any plan that might alter regional borders or limit Armenia’s sovereignty would by default weaken the Islamic Republic’s influence in the South Caucasus. Since 2020, when Azerbaijan recovered most of its lost territories, Tehran has actively resisted the projects advanced by Baku which would see the so-called Zangezur Corridor (in Armenia referred to as “corridor” or “Syunik corridor”) running through Armenia’s southernmost territory of Syunik. Iran considers the short border with Armenia as an only reliable land link into the South Caucasus, free of Turkish-Azerbaijani influence. The route to Armenia is also a corridor for Iran to access Georgia’s Black Sea ports and from there the European market.
The TRIPP also benefits Turkey since it strips Iran of a geopolitical leverage it has had over Azerbaijan, namely, the Aras corridor which connects Azerbaijan proper with its exclave of Nakhichevan via Iran’s northern territory. In 2023, Baku and Tehran reached an agreement to expand the infrastructure along the route which envisioned a transit flow of 15 million tons of cargo by the end of this decade. The corridor stretching for 107 km though is not seen by Iran as a mere transit of goods and passengers through its territory. In fact, Tehran perceives the route as an important instrument for retaining influence in the South Caucasus and for checking Turkey’s growing role.
Russia’s position in the South Caucasus meanwhile is changing. Russia is preoccupied with its war in Ukraine, remains heavily sanctioned by Western countries and the dialogue with the United States has not yielded any results; on the contrary, President Donald Trump now seeks to bring the war to an end by stepping up the military pressure on Russia. In this wider context, Moscow’s relations with Azerbaijan, Turkey’s key ally, are undergoing structural shifts which began in late 2024 when an Azerbaijani civilian plane was shot down by Russian air defense batteries over the North Caucasus. The incident however only served as a pretext, overshadowing the much deeper differences between Baku and Moscow. With the return of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan has become more self-reliant in pursuing its foreign policy aims. Meanwhile, Russia’s relations with its major ally in the region, Armenia, are also changing.
Discontent with how Russia acted in 2020 and 2023 when Nagorno-Karabakh fell, Yerevan began to rapidly diversify its foreign policy by developing multiple strategic partnerships with actors ranging from the US to China. These two major developments elevate the role that the Turkey-Azerbaijan axis plays in the region and paved the way for the rapprochement between Ankara and Yerevan.
Given the fact that the TRIPP should facilitate the reaching of a Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal, it will also, in turn, advance the ongoing rapprochement process between Yerevan and Ankara. Initiated in the aftermath of the second Nagorno-Karabakh War, the dialogue between Turkey and Armenia initially centered on the potential opening of the common border closed since 1990s when the first war over Nagorno-Karabakh raged and Ankara supported Baku. Eventually, the Armenian-Turkish rapprochement began to cover the restoration of diplomatic ties. The two sides held a series of meetings and the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan even went to Turkey on an official visit.
On September 12, a meeting between Armenia and Turkey's special representatives for the normalization of relations, Ruben Rubinyan and Serdar Kılıç, took place in Yerevan. The two sides reaffirmed their commitment to continuing the process of dialogue and cooperation, emphasizing its importance for the entire region. Yet, the meeting did not yield any major progress for Yerevan, as it seemed to have served to clarify the details of Armenia’s compliance with Baku and Ankara’s demands. Just prior to the meeting, the Armenian side announced it would drop featuring the Mount Ararat on the country’s border crossing stamps. This is not the first time that Armenia did so. In 2008, when a major normalization effort between Ankara and Yerevan was underway, the Armenian Football Federation briefly removed the depiction of the Mountain Ararat from its logo but the decision was swiftly rescinded.
The slow progress of the ongoing Armenia-Turkey talks once again shows that the key to normalization lies in a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Turkey, time and again, has also made it clear that the final resolution of the differences between the two sides was contingent upon Yerevan and Baku reaching a comprehensive peace agreement. This involves Armenia changing the preamble of its constitution with its reference to the Nagorno-Karabakh. Another precondition seemed to have been what Baku referred to as the Zangezur Corridor.
CONCLUSION: The US involvement in the South Caucasus means that Washington will become dependent on Turkey to ensure the long-term viability of the corridor through Armenia. The TRIPP not only invites direct American economic presence in the South Caucasus but also expands Turkey’s role in the region. The losers are Iran and Russia and in response a further alignment between Tehran and Moscow can be anticipated. Both Iran and Russia prefer north-south connectivity, while Turkey and the Western countries opt for the east-west direction of railways and pipelines.
Yet, in practice, Russia and Iran have fewer tools to reverse the development of the TRIPP. Neither Tehran nor Moscow can afford any deterioration of ties with Turkey or Armenia and Azerbaijan at the time when the Islamic Republic and Russia have other pressing geopolitical issues to attend to.
Emil Avdaliani is a research fellow at the Turan Research Center and a professor of international relations at the European University in Tbilisi, Georgia. His research focuses on the history of the Silk Roads and the interests of great powers in the Middle East and the Caucasus.
In order to ease the concerns of skeptics who fear that the domestic peace process with the Kurds could, over time, undermine Turkey’s territorial integrity and national unity, the Turkish government is compelled to demonstrate that it will not tolerate the presence of a heavily armed Kurdish group in Syria with broad autonomous powers. Turkey, though, has little room for maneuver. Attacking the Syrian Kurdish militia YPG would not only jeopardize its newly improved relations with Washington, but it would deal a fatal blow to Turkey’s domestic peace process. Ethnic reconciliation in Turkey and peace and stability in Syria are inseparable. 
BACKGROUND: On July 29, U.S. Ambassador to Ankara Thomas Barrack posted a message of appreciation for Mazloum Abdi, the Kurdish commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF): “Your leadership and the SDF’s perseverant efforts, alongside the Syrian government’s resolute commitment to inclusion under President Sharaa, are pivotal to a stable Syria of one army, one government, one state.” Barrack, who is also the Trump administration’s Syria envoy, has met Abdi several times and was present during talks between him and Damascus’ new rulers as he keeps a close eye on the dialogue between the SDF and the transitional government headed by Ahmet al-Sharaa.
For many years, Turkey refused to use the name SDF, claiming that the United States introduced the name to sugarcoat the People’s Protection Units (YPG) -- an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers´ Party (PKK) -- that makes up the bulk of the SDF. The U.S. decision in 2014 to arm and support the YPG against the Islamic State (IS) was viewed as a hostile act by Ankara. Since 2015, YPG/PKK forces have been repeatedly targeted by Turkey, and Turkish cross-border incursions into Syria have at times risked pitting Turkish forces against the U.S. forces protecting the Kurdish militia.
However, the growing U.S. involvement in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad has been welcomed by Ankara. Ankara has expressed appreciation for Barrack’s mediation efforts between Damascus and the YPG. “Barrack represents a new approach—one that understands the regional dynamics, strives for neutrality, and believes that American interests lie in winning hearts across the region. We appreciate this as well. It’s the genuine vision we’ve been waiting for years,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.
As a strong backer of Sharaa and his efforts to reunite Syria, Barrack has been on the same page as Ankara, which similarly advocates for a centralized Syrian state. But after a wave of mass killings in July in Sweida, a Druze-majority city, Barrack acknowledged that Syria might need to consider alternatives to a highly centralized state. “Not a federation but something short of that, in which you allow everybody to keep their own integrity, their own culture, their own language, and no threat of Islamism,” he told reporters.
As talks were being launched between Damascus and the YPG, the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, on February 25, called on the PKK to lay down its arms and dissolve itself. On March 10, President Sharaa and SDF chief Mazloum Abdi signed a landmark agreement to integrate “all civil and military institutions in northeast Syria under the administration of the Syrian state, including border crossings, the airport, and oil and gas fields,” according to a statement by the Syrian Presidency. On July 11, the PKK began to lay down its arms in a symbolic ceremony in northern Iraq, but the March 10 agreement in Syria remained unimplemented. That, in turn, jeopardizes the domestic peace process in Turkey, which is intimately linked to the developments in Syria.
IMPLICATIONS: Critics in the opposition in Turkey claim that the decision of the Turkish state last year to embark on a new peace process with the Kurds was motivated by domestic political concerns. The real purpose, they claim, is to secure the reelection of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdoğan is constitutionally barred from seeking reelection, unless snap elections are called by parliament, or the constitution is revised, for which he needs to mobilize the support of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party in return for concessions on Kurdish rights. On July 6, the PKK’s imprisoned founding leader, Abdullah Öcalan, reportedly told a visiting delegation from the DEM Party that he will not stand in the way of the reelection of Erdoğan.
While securing the reelection of Erdoğan is undoubtedly an important driver of the peace process, the Turkish state also has geopolitical motives for seeking to secure the loyalty of the Kurds that it fears would otherwise be tempted to gravitate toward Israel, the new hegemonic power in the Middle East. Israel has been vocal in its support for Kurdish autonomy in Syria, and Israel’s foreign minister has stated that the Kurds are Israel’s “natural allies against Turkey and Iran.”
In contrast to Turkey’s policy of promoting Syria’s territorial and political unity, Israel favors a fragmented and weak Syria. Turkey suspects that Israel is encouraging unrest within the Druze community, and is also intent on strengthening Kurdish positions, leaving Damascus facing military challenges on multiple fronts. The Syrian minority groups remain distrustful of President Sharaa, who has struggled to control jihadist elements, which have been blamed for atrocities against Alawites and against members of the Druze community, who are supported by Israel.
On August 13, Turkish Foreign Minister Fidan issued a strong warning, urging the SDF to abandon hopes of cooperating with Israel against Damascus and to honor its agreement to integrate with the central government. "The YPG/SDF must stop its policy of playing for time," Fidan told a press conference with his Syrian counterpart al-Shibani in Ankara. "Just because we approach (the process) with good intentions does not mean we don't see your little ruses," Fidan said.
Turkey and Syria signed a memorandum of understanding on military training during the visit of al-Shibani. Turkey will help Syria with the provision of weapons systems and logistical tools, and will also train Syria’s army, according to the statement made by Turkish Defense Ministry officials. Meanwhile, Turkish pro-government outlets have raised the possibility of a military offensive by the Syrian army against the YPG.
There are strong suspicions both at the governmental and societal level in Turkey that—with strong U.S. military backing—the Kurds in Syria will continue to pursue separatist ambitions under the banner of the YPG. While Ankara is pressuring Damascus to resist YPG’s demands for a decentralized system, few in Turkey believe the YPG will abandon the gains it acquired.
On September 2, Pervin Buldan, a member of the delegation from the DEM Party that has been meeting with Abdullah Öcalan on the prison island İmralı south of Istanbul, informed that the founding leader of the PKK had emphasized that “Syria and Rojava is my red line,” making clear -- if anyone had believed otherwise -- that he will not call for the dissolution of the YPG or for the dismantlement of the autonomous structure that has been put in place by the Kurds in northeastern Syria.
“Turkey needs to side with the Kurdish people regarding Rojava and Syria. Turkey has nothing to gain from trying to deprive the Kurds of what they’ve gained, and the Kurds in Turkey will never accept this,” Buldan insisted.
However, in order to ease the concerns of skeptics who fear that the domestic peace process with the Kurds could, over time, undermine Turkey’s territorial integrity and national unity, the Turkish government is compelled to demonstrate that it will not tolerate the presence of a heavily armed Kurdish group in Syria with broad autonomous powers. Turkey, though, has little room for maneuver.
Launching military assaults against the YPG would not only jeopardize Ankara’s newly improved relations with Washington, but it would deal a fatal blow to its domestic peace process. Instead, Ankara might try to entice Sharaa to take military action against the YPG, but that would face U.S. resistance, and Sharaa cannot afford to alienate Washington, on whose political and economic support he critically depends.
CONCLUSION: Representatives of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party are calling for a paradigm shift; one that sees the YPG in Syria not from a security perspective but from a “confidence” perspective. They argue that the Turkish nation should rely on a strong secular force in Syria that has its ethnic kin in Turkey, rather than relying on an Arab Sunni force that harbors Islamist tendencies. They also point out that pursuing peace in Turkey while simultaneously threatening the Kurds in Syria -- as Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan is doing –– defies logic.
Meanwhile, President Erdoğan evokes the supposedly primordial Islamic alliance of Turks, Kurds, and Arabs. History teaches that Turks, Kurds, and Arabs prevail when they are united, and succumb when they are not, Erdoğan claimed. “The victory at Manzikert, the conquest of Jerusalem, the conquest of Istanbul, the defense of Gallipoli, and the War of Independence were all the common wars and victories of Turks, Arabs, Kurds, and of many other Muslim peoples,” he said in a recent speech.
Turkey has come to enjoy good relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq after having resisted the establishment of a Kurdish administrative entity there. That may provide a blueprint for the future relationship between Turkey and Rojava.
Yet the Turkish public remains skeptical that the PKK – although officially dissolved is endowed with a territorial base in Rojava -- has abandoned its nationalist aspirations. The involvement of the United States and Israel in Syria and their backing of Kurdish aspirations validate longstanding Turkish nationalist fears that “Western imperialists” seek the establishment of an independent Kurdistan.
And after having insisted for the past ten years that the Kurdish autonomy in Rojava represents an existential threat to Turkey, the Turkish government must now convince a skeptical public that Turkey’s national security interests in fact call for an entente with the erstwhile enemy.
This is a watershed moment in both Turkey and Syria. The domestic peace process in Turkey and the concurrent attempts to secure peace and stability in Syria are inseparable.
Barçın Yinanç is a foreign policy commentator at the Turkish news site t24.
By Halil Karaveli
This opinion piece was concurrently published in The Financial Times. Read the original piece here.
By arresting opposition mayors, the president is following the playbook of his hero Adnan Menderes — and inviting chaos
A protester in Istanbul this month displays an image of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the city’s mayor whose arrest in March prompted the biggest demonstrations in Turkey in more than a decade © Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images
On July 5, Turkish police detained the mayors of Adana, Adiyaman and Antalya on corruption charges, which they deny. They were subsequently arrested. On July 4, the former mayor of Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city, and the local head of the opposition Republican People’s party (CHP) were arrested too.
The CHP carried the municipal elections in March 2024. With nearly 38 per cent of the votes, the party — which was founded by Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — became the country’s leading party in terms of vote share for the first time since 1977. Of Turkey’s 81 provinces, the CHP won 35. It wrested 10 provinces from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conservative Justice and
Development party (AKP). According to the polls, the CHP would carry a national election if it were held today.
Erdoğan’s response has been to launch an unprecedented crackdown. So far, 17 CHP mayors have been arrested. The arrest of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, in March sparked the biggest demonstrations in Turkey in more than a decade — and a market downturn. On Wednesday, he was sentenced to 20 months in prison on charges of insulting a prosecutor.
İmamoğlu called the latest crackdown “a coup against democracy”. Erdoğan
defended it, alleging that the “CHP is mired in corruption”. He told the CHP to abstain from protests and disingenuously called on it to wait for the verdicts of the “independent judiciary”.
It’s now clear that Erdoğan is implementing a blueprint to demoralise and disable the CHP. But it’s equally clear that the CHP has no intention of yielding.
On July 6, CHP leader Özgür Özel exhorted Erdoğan to “come to his senses”,
vowing to mobilise mass protests on the scale of Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests in 2011. On July 7, the public prosecutor of Ankara launched an investigation into Özel — whose parliamentary immunity stands to be revoked — on accusations of “inciting crime”, “threatening public officials” and “insulting the president”.
Erdoğan can deploy the might of the state against opponents. He’s also
emboldened by the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) that began disarming on July 11. Yet his autocratic model is unsustainable.
The president hopes to forge an alliance with the Kurds, and secure re-election. But the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy and Equality (DEM) party recognises that the crackdown on the CHP undermines the prospects of reconciliation and has denounced it.
Erdoğan enjoyed widespread popular legitimacy when he had secularist military officers arrested in purges between 2008 and 2014 — as well as when followers of the cleric Fethullah Gülen were purged after a 2016 coup attempt and when he targeted the Kurdish political movement. Today, the majority, including a
significant proportion of Erdoğan’s own base, disapproves of the arrests, and views the allegations of corruption as politically motivated fabrication.
Erdoğan pretends that his electoral majority gives him licence to trample on
democratic and civil liberties. During the Gezi protests against public land seizures in 2013, he said that “democracy is the ballot box, period”. Now, the ballot box itself is ignored. For the first time, that has put Erdoğan on a collision course with a broad majority that won’t passively acquiesce.
Ominously, Turkish history is repeating itself. In the late 1950s another
democratically elected conservative Turkish leader, who also pretended to embody popular will, tried to disable the CHP. After his party lost significant ground to the CHP in elections, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes — who is, not coincidentally, Erdoğan’s political hero — responded by jailing journalists and bringing criminal charges against CHP members of parliament.
The attempt to criminalise the opposition led to protests, and the oppression that the Menderes government unleashed threw Turkey into a deep crisis. In 1960, that government was ousted in a coup by military officers acting outside the chain of command. By abolishing democracy, Erdoğan is also inviting a chaotic end to his rule.
Halil Karaveli is a senior fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and the author of Why Turkey is Authoritarian: From Atatürk to Erdoğan.
Earlier Articles
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Joint Center PublicationsOp-ed Halil Karaveli "The Rise and Rise of the Turkish Right", The New York Times, April 8, 2019 Analysis Halil Karaveli "The Myth of Erdogan's Power", Foreign Policy, August 29, 2018 Analysis Svante E. Cornell, A Road to Understanding in Syria? The U.S. and Turkey, The American Interest, June 2018 Op-ed Halil Karaveli "Erdogan Wins Reelection", Foreign Affairs, June 25, 2018 Article Halil Karaveli "Will the Kurdish Question Secure Erdogan's Re-election?", Turkey Analyst, June 18, 2018 Research Article Svante E. Cornell "Erbakan, Kisakürek, and the Mainstreaming of Extremism in Turkey", Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, June 2018 Analysis Svante E. Cornell "The U.S. and Turkey: Past the Point of No Return?", The American Interest, February 1, 2018 Op-ed Svante E. Cornell "Erdogan's Turkey: the Role of a Little Known Islamic Poet", Breaking Defense, January 2, 2018 Research Article Halil Karaveli "Turkey's Authoritarian Legacy", Cairo Review of Global Affairs, January 2, 2018
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