Under US pressure, Turkey focuses on relations with Baghdad

The visit of Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to Baghdad, three years after the 2011 visit of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has to be seen as a new start between the two countries.

This visit may well signal a serious changing of tracks of Turkish diplomacy, which under Erdogan and then-Foreign Minister Davutoglu was perceived as a Sunni-oriented neo-Ottoman Middle East policy. The New York Times wrote that Davutoglu had shown in this visit that he has abandoned his passion for a “Sunni axis.”