Turkish Airlines Captures the Gulf Hubs' Lost Transfer Passengers

Six months after the war that began on 28 February 2026 with United States and Israeli strikes on Iran, the map of long-haul air travel across Europe, the Middle East and Asia has been redrawn. The Gulf hubs that spent two decades building an economy around connecting passengers are still open, but a large share of their transfer traffic now moves through other airports. Istanbul is the clearest winner, and Turkish Airlines has been described by air transport specialists as the big winner of the situation.

Between April and June 2026, traffic at Middle Eastern airlines measured in passenger kilometres fell 30 percent according to the International Air Transport Association, and the drop reached close to 50 percent on routes to Europe. That matters because connecting travellers accounted for roughly half of all traffic through Dubai and Abu Dhabi and close to three quarters of traffic through Doha. As recently as 2025, about one in six connecting passengers worldwide transited the Middle East.

Since the outbreak of the conflict, restrictions over Iran and Iraq have removed the direct central routing between Europe and Asia. Kuwait remains closed to overflights, and European safety authorities have advised operators to avoid Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the western Gulf of Oman. With Russian airspace also unavailable to most Western carriers, two corridors now carry the bulk of Europe to Asia flying. The northern one runs through Türkiye, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The southern one runs through Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Istanbul sits at the entrance of the northern route.

Istanbul is sitting at the global centre of gravity for air transport, able to link Europe and Asia with only a limited detour. Turkish Airlines has also spent several years expanding its network, and it operates from a modern airport opened in 2018 with three independent runways that can be used simultaneously around the clock.

The carrier's own figures confirm the shift. Its customer base is up 5 percent since the start of the conflict. In July 2026 its capacity, measured in seats and distance flown, was down 25 percent towards the Middle East, but up 6 percent towards Europe and up 16 percent towards East Asia. Cargo has followed the same pattern, with freight and mail volumes rising 8.8 percent year on year to 198,300 tons in March. Management said in August that part of the passenger flow had turned away from the Gulf towards other itineraries.

The symbolic moment came in July. Istanbul Airport handled 8.15 million passengers, a rise of 2.3 percent year on year, while London Heathrow recorded 7.86 million, a fall of 1.5 percent. Heathrow lost its position as the busiest airport in Europe for the first time since 2023, and its Middle East route traffic was down 20.2 percent year on year. Istanbul chief executive Selahattin Bilgen called the milestone a reflection of the airport's runway capacity, and a fourth runway is expected to enter service by the end of 2026, pushing annual capacity towards 90 million passengers.

The Gulf carriers are slowly starting to regain their market share. In early August, Emirates said it had restored 92 percent of the capacity it had planned before the war. Qatar Airways said in mid June that it had brought back 85 percent of its network. Etihad has held up best, and in August it was the only one of the three large Gulf carriers to raise capacity year on year, by 9 percent. Even so, scheduled seats at Dubai were down 15 percent year on year in August, the steepest fall among the world's ten largest airports, although the emirate remained the leading international airport by that measure. Turkish Airlines has said it aims to return to its pre-conflict daily frequencies to the Gulf by October, when the peak travel season starts.

Whether the traffic returns is now the central question for the region. In early July, IATA still described the diversion as most likely temporary. The longer the disruption lasts, the greater the chance that booking habits harden. A crisis that first looked cyclical is becoming increasingly structural. A separate and slower threat is also building for every hub model, because single-aisle aircraft such as the Airbus A321XLR can now fly about eleven hours with 200 passengers, making direct links between secondary cities viable without a stopover.

Costs have not spared the Turkish carrier. Jet fuel supply tightened after strikes on energy infrastructure and the disruption of flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Turkish Airlines reported no serious fuel shortage, but it was hedged on roughly 40 percent of its jet fuel and has been buying the remainder at about double the pre-conflict price. Chairperson Murat Şeker described that cost pressure as difficult to absorb.

The aviation story sits inside a wider repositioning. Ankara kept its airspace open and adopted what analysts describe as active neutrality, and that stance has done as much for Turkish Airlines as geography has. It also fits a broader pattern in which Türkiye has become the main regional beneficiary of Iran's decline. Tehran has lost a large part of the proxy network that underpinned its regional reach, and the fall of the Assad government had already cut the land corridor it had built towards the Mediterranean.

That opening has been formalised in security terms. On 7 August 2026, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Deterrence Agreement, which states that an armed attack on any of the three signatories is treated as an attack on all. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has since said Ankara wants to widen the arrangement beyond three members. Analysts caution that the text is a framework for strategic, military and industrial coordination rather than a fully specified mutual defence treaty, but its direction is clear. Israel, which now views a Sunni bloc led by Türkiye and supported by Qatar as a rising factor, has responded by tightening its own partnerships in the eastern Mediterranean.

The economic arm of the strategy runs east. Türkiye has invested heavily in the Organization of Turkic States and in the Middle Corridor, the Trans-Caspian route linking China to Europe through Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan and Georgia. When Hormuz transit volumes collapsed by about 86 percent during the escalation, container demand on the Middle Corridor jumped by 450 to 500 percent within a single week compared with the same period a year earlier. The organisation projected around 10 percent growth in corridor volumes for 2026, on top of close to 11 percent in 2025, and pressure is now concentrated on the Caspian ports of Baku, Aktau and Turkmenbashi. Ankara has also pushed the Development Road through Iraq, a corridor project that competes directly with routes Tehran once controlled.

The military footprint follows the same arc. Turkish forces hold positions in northern Syria and have deepened their presence there through 2026, with reported movements towards Deir ez Zor in July and reinforced outposts at Ras al-Ayn. Türkiye maintains a base in Qatar, a training facility in Somalia, operations in northern Iraq and a defence partnership with Azerbaijan formalised in the 2021 Shusha Declaration, alongside the intervention in Libya that reshaped that conflict. At the EFES-2026 exercise near Izmir, Libyan and Syrian troops took part for the first time, a detail that says more about Ankara's regional ambition than any communiqué.