Development Road will add ‘billions’ to Turkish economy

A regional transport and infrastructure corridor will generate billions of dollars for Turkey and create tens of thousands of jobs, the country’s transport minister said, as Ankara tries to position itself as a logistics gateway between Asia and Europe.

The Development Road project, announced in 2023, is estimated to boost the Turkish economy by $55 billion over the next decade, transport and infrastructure minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said.

The rail and road project will establish a production and logistics centre, generating 70,000 new jobs annually with backing from Iraq, Qatar, the UAE and Turkey, the state-run Anadolu news agency quoted the minister as saying.

The $17 billion project will build a 1,200km railway and parallel motorway linking Iraq’s Grand Faw Port in the oil-rich south to the Turkish border, where it will connect to Europe via Turkey’s rail network.

By tying into transport links across the region, including the UAE and Qatar, the corridor also aims to turn Iraq into a transit hub between Asia and Europe and rival the Suez Canal.

Construction has begun on the Zangezur corridor, with 224km to be built by a local contractor, the minister said, adding that plans are to connect the corridor to ports in the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean.

The Zangezur corridor will run along Armenia’s border with Iran and link Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan enclave within Armenia, which is cut off from the main part of the country but has a shared border with Turkey.

Azerbaijan has completed a significant section of the corridor on its side, but no active construction is underway along the route.

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Uraloglu said negotiations are ongoing between Turkey and Syria to rebuild sections of the historic Hejaz railway linking Damascus to Jordan that were destroyed.

Oman informed Iraq in September last year that it wants to be part of the project, Iraq’s transport minister Razzak Al-Saadawi said.

US management consultancy Oliver Wyman has been contracted to prepare a study on the project’s potential returns once it is commissioned.