ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkey on Tuesday partially reopened its Habur border crossing after a three-week closure, saying that only 1,250 vehicles would be allowed to cross each day. “Only 500 vehicles will be allowed to drive over the border from Turkey to Iraq and 750 vehicles will be permitted to enter Turkey from Iraq,” the Today’s Zaman website quoted customs and trade minister Bulent Tufenkci as saying. The ordinarily busy crossing was closed on December 14 by Turkish authorities, following a curfew in nearby Kurdish towns in Turkey, as Ankara continued an ongoing crackdown on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The Habur crossing is located some 18 kilometers south of the Silopi district in Sırnak province, where severe clashes continue between security forces and the outlawed PKK. The closure had left thousands of cargo trucks stranded along both sides of the border. Tufenkci said that as many as 13,500 trucks were waiting at the Habur gate, with 9,500 held up in Iraq, unable to cross into Turkey. “A sizeable part of our exports, $8.5 billion worth, went through this gate in 2015. Exporters in İstanbul and eastern and southeastern Turkey send their goods to Iraq via this gate,” the minister added, according to the news website. “Local trade unions said earlier that the estimated loss in exports to Iraq since the beginning of December was $450 million,” the website said. “A daily average of 6,000 trucks used to drive through the Habur gate before the curfew, accounting for 45 percent of land crossings between Iraq and Turkey,” it added.
