Türkiye expects the Development Road, a planned trade corridor linking the Persian Gulf to Europe through Iraq, to add about $55 billion to its economy over 10 years once completed, a senior official said Monday.
The project should also create jobs for roughly 70,000 people a year, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu said.
Uraloğlu was speaking in Ankara at a conference on changing global transport geopolitics and the Development Road project.
Cargo leaving Iraq's Faw Port, on the Gulf coast in Iraq's far south, would travel about 1,200 kilometers (745.65 mil es) by rail to Ovaköy, a crossing on the Türkiye-Iraq border in southeastern Türkiye. From there, it would continue across Türkiye toward Europe. The initiative was unveiled in May 2023 and is estimated to cost $20 billion.
Jobs from logistics, production hubs
Uraloğlu said the jobs would come from production and logistics centers built along the route.
The project also includes energy transmission lines and fiber optic infrastructure alongside the rail and road links, and officials hope it will further deepen economic ties between Türkiye and Iraq.
He also said transit from the Gulf to Europe along the route would fall to about 25 days.
That compares with 45 days around the Cape of Good Hope, off Africa's southwestern coast, and 35 days via the Southern Corridor.
Lower logistics costs, Uraloğlu added, would make Turkish exporters more competitive and strengthen Türkiye's position in global trade.
Officials have repeatedly tied the project to instability around the Strait of Hormuz.
The strait is the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf through which much of the world's oil was shipped before the Iran war started.
Uraloğlu had said that had the Development Road been completed, the world's energy supply would have been far less affected, and that the project would be started quickly after the war ends.
Transit push
The Development Road forms part of Türkiye's wider push to become a transit hub between Asia and Europe. It complements the Middle Corridor, the route across Central Asia and the Caucasus, and Ankara has described both as central to Türkiye's strategy.
Earlier this month, Türkiye opened the Çerkezköy-Kapıkule section, the longest part of the Halkalı-Kapıkule high-speed rail line, extending the network to the Bulgarian border.
The line is 229 kilometers long. It begins on Istanbul's western edge and ends at Türkiye's main rail and road border crossing with Bulgaria, at Kapıkule near the northwestern city of Edirne.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the line is a key component of the 2,094-kilometer Turkish section of the Development Road. The line extends the European end of the same network.