How Iran lost Turkey
Middle East Eye
Your eye on the ground. Independent Middle East and North Africa news.
By Ragip Soylu - MEE Turkey Bureau Chief
When Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Iran in 2014, he was in high spirits.
During a meeting with then-Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri, Erdogan smiled for the cameras as he discussed potential trade deals and ways to deepen energy and industrial ties.
"Iran is our second home," he declared, before giving a short speech on improving bilateral relations and thanking his hosts.
Eleven years on, however, sympathy for Iran in Turkey is at an all-time low.
While the Turkish public has largely condemned Israel's unprovoked attack on Iran, politicians have little love for the Islamic Republic.
From jubilation to strained relations
Some have attributed these tensions to the long-standing rivalry dating back to the Ottoman era, but the Islamic conservative movement led by Erdogan and his predecessors wasn’t always so distant from Iran.
The Turkish political Islamist movement was shaped by Necmettin Erbakan over several decades, beginning in the 1960s.
When the Islamic revolution took place in Iran in 1979, Turkish Islamists were jubilant.
Many of them read the works of the revolution’s ideologue, Ali Shariati, and even in the 1990s, they still looked up to Iran as a model in certain respects.
Despite the Sunni-Shia divide that shaped much of the rest of the Islamic world - particularly in the Middle East - Turkish religious conservatives rejected such binaries. They didn’t view the region through that lens.
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Erbakan, for example, famously tried to unite Muslim-majority countries under the banner of the D-8 economic cooperation organisation in 1997, persuading Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Pakistan to join.
What most people outside Turkey don’t know is that one of the events that triggered the military’s ouster of Erbakan's government in January 1997 was Al-Quds Night, organised by his Welfare Party in Ankara’s Sincan district, attended by the Iranian ambassador.
A play highlighting the Palestinian cause was staged, with Hezbollah and Hamas flags displayed in the hall. The Iranian ambassador gave a fiery speech criticising the secular nature of the Turkish government.
This was eventually used as a pretext by the military to move against Erbakan’s government, toppling him without the use of force.
When Erdogan and his allies co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002, he maintained his pro-Iranian stance, despite his liberal and pro-EU rhetoric.
One of his most notable moves was collaborating with Brazil to help resolve a key bottleneck in the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West.
Under this exchange deal, Iran agreed to ship 1,200 kg of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Turkey in return for nuclear fuel rods for a medical research reactor.
In 2010, Erdogan also called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to offer condolences after the death of Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah.
And in 2011, Erdogan became the first Sunni leader to visit Ali’s tomb in Najaf, later meeting Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as well.
Turkey's relationship with Iran was so close that US reports in 2012 accused Erdogan of leaking the names of Israeli spies operating out of Turkey to Tehran - a charge Turkish officials have vehemently denied to this day.
However, Ankara's view of Iran gradually and dramatically shifted after Iran’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, starting in 2011.
Although Erdogan initially tried to persuade Assad to enact reforms and resolve the rebellion peacefully, Assad chose Tehran as his main backer and responded to peaceful protests with force.
The turning point for Ankara was the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons in 2013, followed by the siege of towns like Aleppo in 2014, which led to mass hunger, killings, and forced displacement.
Iran's direct support for these crimes, along with Hezbollah’s involvement, deeply unnerved Ankara, which viewed the Syrian conflict as an existential threat.
Iran's attempts to sabotage the peace process between Turkey and the PKK in 2013 also didn’t go unnoticed.
Since then, the relationship has become increasingly transactional. Ankara has maintained trade ties and sought common ground with Iran, particularly regarding Syria, but Turkish officials no longer harbour goodwill toward their Iranian counterparts.
Today, the relationship remains tense, despite Erdogan's supportive remarks for Iran following the recent Israeli strikes on Iranian targets.
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Retraité chez ENSV
2moHistory retains that Türkiye-Iran relations have always been very stormy From 16th to early 19th century for possession of the Middle East and Caucasus. They end with the treaties of Erzurum , signed in 1823 and 1847. Among the numerous treaties, the Treaty of Zuhab of 1639 is usually considered as the most important one, as it fixed present Turkey–Iran and Iraq–Iran borders. In later treaties, there were frequent references to Treaty of Zuhab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman%E2%80%93Persian_Wars?oldid=739508953
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2moÇok faydalı bir yazı olmuş. Özellikle bölgeye açılmayı planlayan Türk girişimciler için önemli bir bilgi kaynağı olacağına inanıyorum. Katkılarınız çok değerli, teşekkür ederim.