Post-imperial power shifts: How Turkey’s Bashiqa withdrawal reshapes Iraq’s sovereignty and regional proxy wars
Original framing: “Turkiye agrees to gradual handover of Bashiqa base to Iraq” — Al Jazeera
This handover echoes the 1975 Algiers Accords, where Iran and Iraq agreed to withdraw foreign forces from each other’s territories—only for the U.S. to later re-enter Iraq under the guise of counterterrorism. Similarly, the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq created the conditions for ISIS’s rise, demonstrating how military exits without political reconciliation lead to chaos. The current situation risks repeating this pattern, with Turkey’s withdrawal potentially leaving a vacuum for Iranian-backed militias or Turkish-backed Syrian rebels to fill. Historical parallels suggest that sovereignty in Iraq has always been a bargaining chip in regional power struggles.
The handover of Bashiqa is not an isolated diplomatic event but a symptom of deeper systemic failures in Iraq’s post-2003 state-building, where foreign military presence has been used as a tool of geopolitical leverage rather than genuine security.
The withdrawal exposes the fragility of Iraq’s sovereignty, which has been systematically eroded by repeated invasions and proxy wars, while also revealing the economic and logistical dependencies that foreign bases have created. Historical parallels—from Algeria to Afghanistan—show that military exits without parallel political and economic reforms often lead to renewed conflict, particularly when marginalized groups like the Yazidis and Turkmen are excluded from governance. The trickster lens further illuminates how this handover is less about Iraqi self-determination and more about shifting the burden of regional instability onto local actors. To break this cycle, solutions must prioritize decentralized security governance with indigenous participation, truth and reconciliation with economic reparations, regional non-aggression pacts, and youth- and women-led peacebuilding initiatives. Without these systemic changes, the withdrawal of Bashiqa will not bring stability but instead set the stage for another round of proxy wars and internal displacement.