Turkey’s Pursuit of New Silk Roads in the Middle East

Amid a relative power vacuum in the Middle East Turkey has emerged as a key balancer and a nodal commecial player.

Since the fall of the Assad dynasty in Syria in December 2024, Turkey’s regional influence has notably grown across the eastern Mediterranean. From Libya to Syria to northern Iraq and the South Caucasus, Ankara’s posture has become more pronounced. This development is aided by major regional shifts such as Iran’s weakening, following its direct confrontation with Israel and the United States in 2025.

Another development that facilitated Turkey’s strengthening clout is that regional countries have grown increasingly fearful of Israel’s overbearing power. The Israeli attack against leaders of Palestinian group Hamas[i] in Doha in September served as a further reminder that Arab states should seek the diversification of their partnerships away from exclusive reliance on the United States. Therefore, it was no coincidence that Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense pact with Pakistan nearly a week after the strikes in Qatar. These shifts allow Turkey to skillfully position itself as an indispensable actor to stabilize the shaken regional balance of power.

This geopolitical momentum propels Turkey to play a greater economic and security role in the Middle East. One of the grand initiatives Ankara has been preoccupied with is to reshape the region in such a way that would allow the country to position itself at the heart of all emerging trade routes. For instance, major effort now goes into reviving the historic Hejaz Railway. Conceived in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, it allowed Istanbul to link up with its most distant territories in an effort to preserve political and administrative cohesion. Following World War I and the dissolution of the empire, however, the railway stopped its operation. Only a few sections of it remained intact in Jordan and some parts of Syria. Major investment and, most of all, common political will was lacking in preserving, and later, re-building it. The war in Syria further constrained the room for cooperation on this infrastructure development project.

This changed after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and Syria’s pivot toward Ankara under the country’s new leadership. In September, officials from Turkey, Syria and Jordan met in Amman to announce their intent to re-establish the rail route.[ii] A preliminary agreement on a draft memorandum of understanding (MoU) was inked. The document envisions joint work on the development of transportation infrastructure, and Ankara pledged to build 30 kilometres of the part of the railway on Syrian territory. From its side, Amman pledged to invest in the maintenance of the railway section in Syria. It is now expected that Jordan and Turkey will reach specific agreements to move ahead with the project.

This also represents a major opportunity for power projection by the Turkish government, allowing Ankara to gain access to Jordan’s Port of Aqaba, which is situated on the Red Sea. This ambition is bolstered by expanding trade ties between Turkey and Jordan, which reached $1.1 billion in 2024[iii] – and expected to top $1.5 billion by the end of this year. Similarly, Turkish-Syrian trade has seen an upturn and reached $1.9 billion in the first half of 2025.[iv]

But the Hejaz railway project is not only about the connection to the Red Sea. Turkey will also enjoy an uninterrupted trade link to the Persian Gulf and its wealthy Arab monarchies. For instance, in October, the Turkish trade minister announced that a road connection from Turkey to the Persian Gulf will become operational in 2026 and will pass through Syria.[v] There is nothing new in this. Turkey is striving to re-invigorate the trade route which was quite successful prior to the Syrian civil war, which disrupted north-south connectivity and commercial activity between Turkey and the Gulf region. Trucks in their thousands traversed the territory from Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf.

These initiatives make up a part of Turkey’s broader efforts to reshape the Middle East’s connectivity in its own favour and follow earlier initiatives such as the work on the Development Road, a massive project linking Turkey’s heartland with the Persian Gulf via Iraq. Turkey wants to counter its competitors. Indeed, the Development Road[vi] is presented as an alternative to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC)[vii], the corridor sponsored by the U.S., the EU, India and the Arab states of the Gulf region. The idea of the Development Road has been around for decades[viii] but was stalled because of instability in Iraq and also due to Turkey’s preoccupation with other geopolitical arenas. If implemented, it will provide Turkey with yet another access route to the Persian Gulf – a route which existed in ancient and medieval times, connecting Asia Minor with the Indian Ocean.

These massive infrastructure development projects fit well into the Gulf region’s growing importance in Turkey’s foreign policy, the trend well exemplified by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s visit to the Persian Gulf in October. The trip to Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman produced 24 agreeements. The choice of these three countries was by no means accidental. Ankara’s perspective on the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian issue are very much in line with how Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman approach the two topics. This set them apart from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, which stick to a more stringent foreign policy stance in this regard. Another difference is the countries’ relations with Iran. Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman have been more cooperative with the Islamic Republic than the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and this softer approach aligns with Turkey’s openness to engagement with Iran, well evident in trade, investments, security issues.

The Turkish president’s visit is part of Ankara’s pivot to the Gulf region and a result of a careful rapprochement which had been taking place since 2020 and especially following the outbreak of the war in Gaza. In 2024, Turkey inked a strategic partnership agreement with Qatar[ix] and developed deep cooperation models with its erstwhile competitors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Similarly, close ties have been developed with other members of the GCC. GCC countries are interested in diversifying their economies beyond their traditional reliance on oil and gas, while Turkey is the largest non-oil economy of the Middle East. Turkey is interested in investments from the GCC while wealthy Arab states seek to tap into Turkey’s commercial potential as well as its sprawling military industrial complex. For instance, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been in talks to strike a $6 billion defence agreement.[x] Negotiations are still ongoing with Saudi Arabia on co-developing KAAN fighter jets too.[xi]

Turkey has thus evolved into a key player in the Middle East amid the weakening of other key actors and the need by smaller ones to balance Israel’s power. The flourishing ties between Turkey and the GCC are key in this dynamic and are buttressed by Ankara’s development of new trade routes spanning the Middle East.