The Baghdad railway, also known as the Berlin–Baghdad railway (Turkish: Bağdat Demiryolu, German: Bagdadbahn, Arabic: سكة حديد بغداد, French: Chemin de Fer Impérial Ottoman de Bagdad), was started in 1903 to connect Berlin with the then Ottoman city of Baghdad, from where the Germans wanted to establish a port on the Persian Gulf,[2] with a 1,600-kilometre (1,000 mi) line through modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

Funding, engineering and construction were mainly provided by the German Empire through Deutsche Bank and the Philipp Holzmann company, which in the 1890s had built the Anatolian Railway (Anatolische Eisenbahn) connecting Istanbul, Ankara and Konya.

If the railway had been completed, the Germans would have gained access to suspected oil fields in Mesopotamia,[note 1] as well as a connection to the port of Basra on the Persian Gulf.

The latter would have provided access to the eastern parts of the German colonial empire, and avoided the Suez Canal, which was controlled by British and French interests.

[12] The Europeans saw great potential to exploit the resources of the weakening empire, irrigation could transform agriculture, there were chromium, antimony, lead and zinc mines and some coal.

As early as 1871, a commission of experts studied the geology of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and reported plentiful oil of good quality but commented that poor transportation made it doubtful that the fields could compete with those already operating in Russia and the United States.

However, private enterprise would not build the railway without subsidies and so the Ottoman government had to reserve part of its revenues to subsidise its construction and thus increase its debt to the European powers.

The line had to cross the Amanus Mountains inland at the cost of expensive engineering including an 8 km tunnel between Ayran station and Fevzipaşa.

[17] In 1898 and 1899, the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works received many applications for permission to construct a railway to Baghdad; it was not because of lack of competition that the Deutsche Bank was finally awarded the concession.

[23][24][25] However, a plan for an extension from Basra towards the Persian Gulf faced opposition from the British and as a result, the emir of Kuwait refused to rent any storage facilities to the Germans.

After a futile price war, the British lines, which had lost their monopoly, came to agreement in 1913 with their competitors and ended a rivalry that had caused considerable political concern.

Such a raise required the agreement of all powers but was vetoed by Britain after Sir Edward Grey spoke in the House of Commons: "if the money is to be used to promote railways which may be a source of doubtful advantage to British trade....

[31] Marxist historians emphasise imperial rivalries and economics as the driving force for the war, as was popularly reported with respect to the railway at the time[6][page needed] and especially as revealed in the Russian diplomatic documents.

The recognised strategic importance is seen by the wartime presence of the British there and by the earlier establishment of the Sheikdom of Kuwait as an autonomous kaza (district) of the Ottoman Empire and a de facto protectorate of Great Britain by the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913 to block northern access to the Persian Gulf.

Other historians have argued that the sum of many other issues, including intractable nationalities and the denial of self-determination to minority groups, were the dominant causes of World War I.

[3]: 128 [35]However, war began on 1 August 1914 – and one day later the secret treaty establishing the Ottoman-German Alliance was signed, perhaps giving credence to the notion that the issue had not been fully resolved.

In fact, restriction of German access to Mesopotamia and its oil, and strategic exclusion from rail access to the Persian Gulf, was enforced by British military presence during World War I, and afterwards in the Treaty of Versailles by removal of the would-be Baghdad railway from German ownership and the transfer to France of the German-held 25% stake in the Turkish Petroleum Company in the San Remo Oil Agreement of 1920.

Thus the potential consequences to Anglo-German economic rivalry in oil and trade by the existence of the railway were ultimately addressed by ownership and outright control, rather than by agreement.

[10][page needed] Marxist historians, unpopular in the Anglo-American perspective on process, would suggest that economic contexts, rather than nationalistic and political rivalries, underlie the root causes.

[36] The total distance was 2,020 kilometres (1,260 mi) The breaks in the railway meant that the Ottoman government had significant difficulties in sending supplies and reinforcements to the Mesopotamian Front.

During the conflict, Ottoman and German workers, together with Allied prisoners of war, laboured to complete the railway for military purposes but with limited manpower.

The first use of railways for genocide occurred in early 1915, when Armenian women and children from Zeitun were deported on trains to Konya and later marched into the Syrian Desert.

People in Turkey, Italy, France and Britain created various arrangements that gave a certain degree of control over the Baghdad railway to various indistinct interests in those nations.

The strained relations between Turkey, Syria and Iraq, however, has caused continuous traffic to remain rare, and other means of transport soon reduced its strategic and economic relevance.