Turkey begins construction of its section of TRIPP rail corridor, says Eurasianet
The Turkish government is moving quickly to capitalize on new economic opportunities created by US President Donald Trump‘s peace plan for Armenia and Azerbaijan, Eurasianet writes.
As noted, Turkish officials held a groundbreaking ceremony on Aug. 22 for a new 224-km rail line stretching from the eastern Turkish hub of Kars to Dilucu at the frontier with Azerbaijan’s Nakhijevan exclave. The Kars-Dilucu rail line is envisioned as the largest section of a new transit corridor that is the centerpiece of the Trump peace plan.
“The possibilities opened up by the Trump plan “will increase economic cooperation in the South Caucasus and accelerate the opening of borders and the normalization of diplomatic relations,” Turkey’s minister for transport and infrastructure, Abdulkadir Uraloglu, said at the groundbreaking festivities, reading a message from Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Uraloglu also described the rail link as “an international bond of steel that will further strengthen the socio-economic relations between Asia and Europe, extending from China to Europe.”
Provided the Azerbaijan-Armenia peace process is finalized, the Kars-Dilucu railway will connect to an existing rail line in Nakhijevan, which, in turn, will link up with the planned “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP).
While Turkey may have officially broken ground on the Kars-Dilucu segment, much remains unclear, including a construction timeline. Uraloglu in his speech hinted the project would take four to five years, but political analysts in Turkey are wondering whether the groundbreaking ceremony actually marked the start of construction or was merely a symbolic gesture tied to Turkey’s domestic political agenda.
Also unclear is what will happen to the existing rail links between Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan?
Prior to the Soviet collapse and the outbreak of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in the late 1980s, there was a direct rail link from Kars to the Armenian capital Yerevan and from Yerevan to the Azerbaijani capital Baku.
Questions are already being raised over the role of an existing Middle Corridor route through Georgia, which only began operating in 2017, following the construction of a new rail line from Kars to the Georgian border. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars line (BTK), as it is known, has not proved to be as popular a freight transit route as originally projected, and is expected to lose much of its Middle Corridor traffic to TRIPP.
