President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi agreed on Wednesday to a gradual transfer of a Turkish military base in northern Iraq to Baghdad, alongside joint efforts to remove banned armed groups from the Sinjar region.

The two leaders met behind closed doors at the Turkish House building in New York, part of a series of bilateral talks Erdogan has held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly’s high-level session this week.

A joint statement said the two governments had reached an understanding on establishing full state authority in Sinjar and ending the presence of banned foreign armed elements there, without naming the groups concerned.

It said Turkish forces would gradually hand over the Bashiqa-Zilkan base to the Iraqi federal government, with the timeline and mechanism for the handover to be agreed separately.

Turkey has maintained a presence at the Bashiqa camp near Mosul since 2015, a deployment that has strained relations with Baghdad, which has repeatedly called for its withdrawal.