By Ahval
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government have had to pay a steep price for their ‘’neo-Ottoman’’ foreign policy in Libya, as well as Iraq and Syria, where Ankara’s support of Islamist forces and parties has proven counterproductive, wrote journalist Zülfikar Doğan in his analysis for Arab Weekly.
‘’Erdogan’s government was all too ready to get involved in the conflict in Libya that followed Qaddafi’s downfall and there was an outcry at the $300 million in cash that was flown to the NTC administration,’’ Doğan wrote, adding that Ankara had never thought it possible that Qaddafi would be overthrown.
Erdogan’s government provided the most significant support to the Islamist rebels when the conflict broke out in Libya, the article stressed, highlighting that Turkish contractors’ building sites were looted, machinery was torched and Turkish citizens were taken captive or deported when the conflict ensued.
‘’More than 600 Turkish firms, which had been involved in projects worth $28.8 billion in Libya, have for seven years been unable to claim their money, have seen their projects torched and have lost machinery worth millions of dollars, leaving them in dire straits,’’ Doğan wrote.
Turkey, similarly, lost its share of the Iraqi market thanks to a foreign policy backing Sunni political groups in the country.
‘’Baghdad placed an embargo on Turkish goods, Turkish contractors were dropped from projects and tenders worth billions of dollars and Turkey lost an export market that had once been its largest,’’ the article recalled.
And then there is neighbouring Syria.
Turkey has lost $20 billion in trade with Syria in the last seven years, Doğan wrote. Meanwhile, expenditure on Syrian refugees in Turkey have reached $33 billion, according to figures disclosed by Erdogan at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.
Stressing that the lost revenues from exports, transport and border trade combined with the costs associated with the millions of Syrian refugees in amount to losses of roughly $50 billion from Syria alone, Doğan underlined that Ankara’s costs in the Syrian war increases every day.
‘’The total losses inflicted on Turkey’s economy by the AKP’s foreign policy mistakes since the “Arab spring” have surpassed $100 billion in seven years,’’ the article highlighted.
