Berlin–Baghdad railway

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, with a 1,600-kilometre (1,000 mi) line through modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Jean-Pierre Filiu, in his 2022 book History of the Middle East, summing up the situation on the eve of the First World War, says of this (projected) railway, "The British ensured that the last stretch of the railway line, linking Baghdad to the port of Basra on the Persian Gulf, was reserved for them". The current line from Baghdad to Basra was not opened until 2014.

The line was completed only in 1940. By the outbreak of World War I, the railway was still 960 km (600 miles) away from its intended objective. The last stretch to Baghdad was built in the late 1930s, and the first train to travel from Istanbul to Baghdad departed in 1940.

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. The Ottoman Empire wished to maintain its control of the Arabian Peninsula and to expand its influence across the Red Sea into the nominally Ottoman (until 1914) Khedivate of Egypt, which had been under British military control since the Urabi Revolt in 1882. If the railway had been completed, the Germans would have gained access to suspected oil fields in Mesopotamia, 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.