ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Direct flights between Kurdistan Region’s capital of Erbil and Turkey’s Kurdish city of Diyarbakir (Amed) will resume this month, a Turkish minister said on Tuesday.
“We received a request about flights from Diyarbakir to Erbil, we are working to realize it within this month,” said Abdulkadir Uraloglu, Turkey’s transport and infrastructure minister, during a speech at a meeting with the Kurdish city’s businessmen.
Direct flights between Diyarbakir and Turkey started in 2016 with a three-flights-a-week schedule.
However following the Kurdistan Region’s independence referendum in 2017, Turkey put a halt on all flights with the Region’s airports. In 2019, the flights between the two cities briefly resumed until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The flights have been suspended since then.
Uraloglu noted that the same request had been asked from Turkey’s vice president Cevdet Yilmaz during his visit to Diyarbakir last month.
During an interview with Rudaw’s Hevidar Zana last month, Mohammed Kaya, the head of Diyarbakir’s chamber of commerce, said that during a meeting with Yilmaz, the vice president told them that the flights will resume soon, without setting a date.
Kaya mentioned that certain issues, which led to the suspension of flights, will be addressed soon. These include a more convenient flight schedule and a simpler visa process for business people and their families. Once these issues are resolved, the flights will resume as soon as possible.
Over the past few years, Ankara has slapped bans on the Kurdistan Region airports due to the political developments in the region, the latest being a flight ban on the Sulaimani International Airport.
In April, then-Turkish foreign ministry spokesperson Tanju Bilgic said that the flight ban was in response to an alleged “intensification” of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) activities in Sulaimani province, referring to the crash of two helicopters carrying Syrian Kurdish fighters a month prior.
Ankara has since then extended the ban two times. In December, Handren Mufti, the director of Sulaimani International Airport, told Rudaw that Turkey has extended its flight ban on the airport until June 22, 2024.
