Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was welcomed on Tuesday as the first Turkish leader to visit Iraq's Kurdish region, on a trip laden with significance born of Turkey's own history of conflict with its Kurdish minority. Turkish flags were hung from flagpoles in Arbil, the Kurdish regional capital. Erdogan attended a ceremony to mark the opening of Arbil's new airport, built, like many projects in the booming region, by a Turkish construction firm.
"We have an historic relationship with Iraq and with this beautiful region," he said in a speech at the airport, during which he made reference to his own efforts to heal relations with Turkey's Kurdish minority in its south-east. Turkish foreign policy was long marked by a deep suspicion of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region set up in the 1990s after the first Gulf War.