The plan of Iraq, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to cooperate on the implementation of the Development Road project, which involves the construction of a road and rail infrastructure system to facilitate connectivity between the Persian Gulf and the Europe, “is very ambitious but rests on weak foundations”. This is what he claims Francesco Sassi, researcher of the independent private company Ricerche Industriale ed Energy (Rie), interviewed by “Agenzia Nova”. The Path to Development project, proposed last year by the Iraqi prime minister Mohammed Shia’ al Sudani, has an estimated cost of 17 billion dollars and extends from the northern Turkish-Iraqi border along the entire length of Iraq, through a 1.200 kilometer road and rail network that touches the cities of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, up to the port commercial center of Al Faw, on the south coast overlooking the Persian Gulf.
Last Monday the transport ministers of Iraq, Razzaq Muhaibis, of Turkey, Abdul Qadir Uraloglu, from Qatar, Jassim bin Saif bin Ahmed al Sulaiti, and the Emirati Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, Suhail Mohammed Faraj al Mazroui, signed a memorandum of understanding in Baghdad which outlines the commitment of their respective countries to establish the necessary measures for the implementation of the infrastructure project, considered of strategic importance to promote regional economic growth. According to Sassi, however, “it is now too early to say whether this project can be a potential alternative route to a corridor as important as that of Suez or the Red Sea”.
At the same time, it is difficult to predict how competitive the Road to Development could be compared to the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor (Imec), launched last year at the G20 summit in New Delhi with the aim of strengthening integration economy between Asia, the Persian Gulf and Europe. The infrastructure project involving Iraq, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates “rests on even more uncertain foundations than those of the Imec”, observes Sassi. “Via dello Sviluppo was born from a very specific intent, linked to the political-economic protagonism of Ankara and Baghdad in the context of the current tensions in the Middle East. Behind the desire to create a corridor that avoids Saudi Arabia and Israel, which in the region have positions very close to those of the US Joe Biden administration, there is also a geopolitical aspect”, explains the Rie researcher.
But what makes the basis of the project weak, according to Sassi, is the fact that “there are four countries (Iraq, Turkey, Qatar and the Emirates) that have very specific and different agendas in the region, in a context of growing tensions”. “Türkiye and Iraq have a clear position in the conflict in the Gaza Strip. Above all, Ankara explicitly supports Hamas. Qatar tries to support regional diplomacy, while the Emirates are the countries in the region that have supported Israel the most and are among other things the only ones of the four to be involved in the IMEC corridor, and therefore there is also a certain ambiguity”, underlines the researcher from Rie. “Furthermore, as is happening at Imec, Via dello Sviluppo will have to deal with a political and economic reality that looms over investors and investments. I imagine that we rightly want to involve international partners and at this moment the risks incurred throughout the Middle East region, from the Strait of Hormuz to Lebanon, from the Red Sea to Iraqi Kurdistan, appear very strong and detrimental to any project that must be based on financing of global finance and international organizations,” explains the analyst.
“It must be said that the international scenario is out of the control of diplomacy, which is the last piece capable of preventing the regional context from exploding in an even greater way”, adds Sassi, in reference to the war in the Gaza Strip, to the crisis in the Red Sea and the potential escalation between Israel and Iran. Furthermore, according to the Rie researcher, in the case of a possible offensive by Turkey against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq, already mentioned several times by Turkish President Erdogan, “the situation of instability could worsen further” . “Probably no Western railway construction company would take a similar risk by financing construction in a context of such heated interstate violence,” observes Sassi. And regarding the times for the creation and completion of the infrastructure project between Iraq, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, “since this is directly influenced by the geopolitical context, a long-term scenario for its development is envisaged”, concludes the researcher from Rie.
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