Iraq reviews Development Road designs

A map showing the paths of Iraq’s Development Road and Egypt’s Suez Canal from Shanghai to Rotterdam. Photo: The Iraqi Transport Ministry Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) – The Iraqi Ministry of Transport has held a coordination meeting with the prime minister’s advisor and representatives from the Italian design consultancy BTP Infrastrutture to review the engineering plans, feasibility studies, and routing for Iraq’s multi-billion-dollar Development Road project. The western Tigris route has been confirmed as the optimal alignment for the 1,200-kilometer (approximately 745 miles) multimodal corridor, linking the al-Faw Grand Port in southern Iraq through multiple provinces up to the Turkish border. The project features a dual-track railway, designed for high-speed passenger trains up to 300 km/h and freight trains up to 120–140 km/h, running parallel to a modern several-lane highway network. BTP Infrastrutture was contracted to deliver technical and economic feasibility studies, preliminary designs, and detailed engineering plans for the railway and highway portions. The Development Road’s primary objective is to transport goods from al-Faw Grans Port to Turkey—and onward to Europe—and vice versa. Work is currently underway to finalize an agreement with Turkey to establish a fund that would finance the project’s implementation by Turkish companies through an oil-for-financing arrangement, according to the state-run Iraqi News Agency (INA). The $17 billion project, which will connect the al-Faw Grand Port in southern Iraq to the Turkish border by constructing a railway and road network, is anticipated to transform Iraq into a transit center by cutting the time it takes to travel from Asia to Europe. In addition to pipelines for energy transportation, the project’s railway will significantly assist in the transportation of commodities, with a first-phase capacity of 3.5 million tons and a second-phase capacity of 7.5 million tons. By connecting the port city of Basra to Turkey via an overland route, the logistics project will compete with Egypt’s Suez Canal and establish Basra as a gateway to Europe.