Turkey to begin Bashiqa base withdrawal this month, Iraq says

BAGHDAD — Turkey will start handing its Bashiqa-Zilkan base in Nineveh to Iraqi forces this month and complete the handover around the end of the year, the government’s military spokesperson said Monday.

Sabah al-Numan, spokesperson for the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, told state-run Al-Iraqiya TV that a joint Iraqi-Turkish security committee had already begun its work. The September agreement that set up the handover published no timetable.

“The camp will be in the hands of the Iraqi security forces at the end of this year and the start of next year,” Numan said.

He said the handover followed the agreement Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reached in New York on Sept. 23. It covered four areas: closer security and strategic coordination, full state authority in Sinjar, the gradual Turkish withdrawal from Bashiqa and wider economic cooperation.

A joint high-level committee then met in Turkey and reached understandings on carrying out the agreement, Numan said, after the Iraqi army took over security in Sinjar in October. That work included ending the presence of armed groups, bringing their weapons under state control and integrating members of the Sinjar Resistance Units and other armed groups into Iraqi security forces, he said.

Numan said the dispute over Bashiqa had gone unresolved under successive governments.

On Sunday, a statement from the commander-in-chief’s office said the joint high committee had agreed that Turkey would begin measures on the ground toward the gradual handover. The two sides would also activate their Joint Security Coordination Committee to oversee the process under way in Sinjar, the statement said.

The Turkish text of the statement, published by Turkey’s Directorate of Communications, said the process aimed to end the presence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in Sinjar. The Arabic text released in Baghdad referred only to armed groups.

Turkey’s Defense Ministry said at its weekly briefing on Oct. 1 that the base would be handed over in stages under an agreed mechanism and timetable, citing the progress of the federal government’s security measures in Sinjar. It gave no dates.

The Sinjar Resistance Units and their women’s units agreed on Oct. 26 to merge 4,165 fighters into federal security forces, and the government said federal authorities would take over security on Mount Sinjar. Numan told the state-run Iraqi News Agency the next day that Ankara had cited the PKK’s presence to justify keeping troops in Iraq and that the merger would help end the Turkish military presence.

Ankara regards the Sinjar Resistance Units, a Yazidi-majority force formed after the Islamic State group’s 2014 genocide against Yazidis, as a PKK affiliate. The PKK, which fought the Turkish state for more than four decades, announced its dissolution in May 2025.

Turkey set up the Bashiqa base, northeast of Mosul, during the war against Isis and reinforced it in 2015, when Turkish troops trained Peshmerga and Sunni Arab fighters there. Successive Iraqi governments objected to the deployment, which was made without federal approval.

The agreements cover only Bashiqa. Turkey has kept forces in the Kurdistan Region for decades for operations against the PKK, and Zaidi told Al-Iraqiya on Oct. 23 that there was an understanding for Turkish forces to leave Iraqi territory but gave no timetable.