• Mercury rising: Turkey's Iran dilemma  - Iason Athanasiadis
Turkey appears increasingly concerned over how it will continue the balancing role it has played in the region.

• The myth of 1639 and Kasri Sirin  - Soner Cagaptay and Duden Yegenoglu
Iran is far from the benevolent neighbor the "Myth of Kasri Sirin" implies.

• Competition over Iraq  - Safa A.Hussein
Turkey and Iran realize that direct intervention and competition over Iraq will not be tolerated by Washington.

• An uneven relationship  - Jalil Roshandel
Both Iran and Turkey are reportedly building up forces around Kurdish zones in Iraq.

• Cooperate to survive  - K. Gajendra Singh
Ankara is now returning to the Middle East and Muslim world.

Mercury rising: Turkey's Iran dilemma
 Iason Athanasiadis

Highly-factionalized revolutionary states like Iran have a tendency to trip over their own rhetoric. Tehran has been protesting for some time that it is a pacifist state seeking to bring stability to a troubled region. Until President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his infamous statements about Israel last November, Iran at least had a chance of convincing a suspicious international community of its case.

Then, last month, Iranian field guns in the sensitive, ethnically-mixed Kordestan province bordering northern Iraq opened fire for the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein in a salvo targeting Kurdish militant positions in the neighboring country. It marked an unprecedented escalation in the tension between the autonomous Kurdish-majority region in Iraq and its Turkish and Persian neighbors.

With Iran's nuclearization a hot button issue, analysts are asking how Turkey, the only NATO country bordering Iran, would respond if the US imposed sanctions on Tehran or chose a military option to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. There is one answer that American policymakers will hear in Ankara: Turkey should not confront Iran because Turkey and Iran have been good neighbors since the 1639 Treaty of Kasri Sirin (also called the Treaty of Zuhab). Turkish policymakers assert that the two countries have neither fought nor changed their mutual border since 1639.

The "Myth of Kasri Sirin" suggests four centuries of amicable ties between Turkey and Iran. Nothing could be further from the truth. Turkey and Iran have repeatedly fought since 1639, and since the 1979 Islamic Revolution Iran has supported terror groups inside Turkey to undermine Ankara.

First a bit of history: the Ottoman and Iranian Empires have fought many wars since Kasri Sirin. For instance, a full-scale war broke out in 1733 when the Persians attempted to take Baghdad from the Turks. The Persian siege of Baghdad and the accompanying battles ended in 1746 with the Treaty of Kurdan, signed between the new Zand Dynasty of Persia and the Ottoman Empire.

Soon after, in 1775, the Zand Dynasty attacked the Ottoman Empire again and captured Basra. The invasion lasted until 1821, at which time another war started between the Ottoman Empire and the new Qajar Dynasty of Persia. The war ended in 1823, with the First Treaty of Erzurum.

Rivalry over Muhammarah region (modern day Khorramshar, Iran) deepened the conflict between the two empires by adding a new dimension to the conflict. Persians and Ottoman Iraqi governors clashed over its control, bringing the two empires to the brink of war in 1840. The British intervened, establishing a boundary commission composed of Iranian, Turkish, British, and Russian diplomats. As a result, the Persian and the Ottoman Empires signed the Second Treaty of Erzurum, which reconfigured the Iranian-Ottoman border.

Troubles between the two countries extended well beyond the Ottoman era. A new book by one of this essay's authors, Soner Cagaptay, entitled Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk?, has brought to light for the first time fighting that took place across the Turkish-Iranian border during Ataturk's rule in Turkey. In 1930, when some Kurds launched a rebellion around Mount Greater Agri (Ararat) in Turkey, Kurdish bands armed by Armenian nationalists entered Turkey across the Iranian border to support the rebellion.

This was not a small skirmish. Turkey used airplanes in a counterattack and mobilized 15,000 troops to suppress the incursion. In the end, the Turkish army was able to put down the border infiltration, though with great difficulty, and only after losing several planes. In 1931, Ankara asked Iran for a border rectification that put Mount Lesser Agri, the base of the 1930 incursions, inside Turkey.

Volatility along the border became an issue again when the terrorist Kurdistan Workers Party launched a campaign against Turkey in 1984. Iran's theocratic regime, which is diametrically opposed to Turkey's secular, pro-western society, saw the PKK as a useful tool with which to wreck havoc in Turkey. Accordingly, Tehran allowed PKK bases such as Haj Umran, Dar Khala, Benchul, Mandali, and Sirabad in its territory. Ali Koknar, an expert on terror, writes that in 1995 the PKK "maintained about 1,200 of its members at around 50 locations in Iran." Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, the PKK crossed from these bases into Turkey, attacking the Turkish military as well as killing civilians.

Iran has supported not only the PKK but also Islamist terrorist cells. Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian-backed terrorist cells have assassinated a number of secular Turkish intellectuals and journalists whom they consider offensive, including theologian Bahriye Ucok, a female Islamist modernizer, and journalist Cetin Emec.

Interestingly, Iran's policy of war by proxy, the use of the PKK and Islamist terrorists to undermine Turkey's secular system, has recently come to a strategic halt. Since the beginning of the Iraq war, Tehran has been feeling US-imposed isolation tightening around it. To break this policy, Iran has launched a policy of courting Ankara. Iran now aims to win the Turks' hearts. In this regard, Tehran is taking advantage of US inaction against the PKK's Qandil terror enclave in northern Iraq--a fact that is planting seeds of resentment in Turkey toward Washington--by launching attacks against Qandil and the very PKK camps Iran allowed in the 1990s.

While these steps are helping Tehran build a positive image in Turkey, the fact is that Iran is far from the benevolent neighbor the "Myth of Kasri Sirin" implies. Turkey and Iran have fought many times since 1639, repeatedly changing their mutual border, including as recently as 1931. Lately, Tehran has fought war by proxy against Ankara. Yet, like all other myths, the "Myth of Kasri Sirin" satisfies a real need: so long as the United States ignores Turkey's battle against the PKK in Iraq, the future holds out the possibility that Ankara may be closer to Tehran than to Washington.-Published 18/5/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org


Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an Ertegun Professor at Princeton University, and chair of the Turkey Program at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. Duden Yegenoglu was a 2024-06 a research assistant at the Washington Institute.

In the sixteenth century, Iran under Safawi rule and Turkey under the Ottomans were rising rival empires in a difficult neighborhood. Their conflicts and rivalry revolved mainly around Iraq and the Caucasus. Today, after a long pause, the situation is not altogether different.

After World War I, the territories that caused the friction and conflict between Turkey and Iran were totally lost by the two states, and the geopolitics of the region changed. Relations between Iran, Turkey, and Iraq were shaped by three realities: pro-western governments ruled the three countries, the USSR presented a common external threat (in 1955, the three joined the Baghdad Pact under the umbrella of the US and UK), and Kurdish insurgencies and armed political movements presented a common potential internal or trans-regional threat.

Indeed, the "Kurdish question" has dominated the foreign policies of Iran, Iraq and Turkey since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It was a potential source of conflict between Turkey and Iran during the 1920s, when the Turkish army crushed the Kurdish revolts in Turkey and resurgent Kurds fled into Iran. Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan (the latter the only state that does not have a significant Kurdish population) established the Sadabad Pact in 1937 in order to secure their borders and prevent subversive (i.e., Kurdish) activities within their territories.

Iran, Iraq and Turkey generally adhered to the Sadabad Pact for a long time. They resisted the temptation to use the "Kurdish card" against one another's interests. However, following the 1958 military coup in Iraq, Iran confronted a power capable of challenging its ambitions to wield hegemonic power in the Gulf after the British withdrawal. The Iranian-Iraqi geo-strategic rivalry was accompanied by a nationalist/ideological clash and long-term border demarcation disputes.

The Kurdish card became an attractive political and military weapon for Iran in its conflicts with Iraq. Turkey apprehensively watched as Iran and Iraq exploited the Kurds for political leverage against each other. Turkey was concerned about a possible refugee flow due to the Iraqi regime's harsh response against the Iraqi Kurds and/or the establishment of an independent Kurdish entity next to its borders.

The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 fundamentally reversed Iran's policy orientation, as revolutionary ideology began to shape its politics. Pursuing an "independent foreign policy" that included "anti-imperialist" discourse meant that one of the pillars of the Iran-Turkey relationship (pro-western policies) was terminated. Still, Turkey quickly recognized the revolutionary regime in Iran because it was worried about the consequences of a possible break-up of the country and its falling into the Soviet sphere of influence.

The outbreak of the war between Iraq and Iran in September 1980 helped Turkey in two ways. First, it prevented a political confrontation with Iran. And second, both Iraq and Iran provided Turkey with profitable markets by acquiring vital goods there. Indeed, in the mid-1980s Turkey's trade volume with Iran and Iraq exceeded two billion dollars annually. Nevertheless, a power vacuum emerged in the north of Iraq after the mid-1980s, as Iraq lost its authority in Kurdistan due to the ongoing war and the Kurdish uprising. Turkey, concerned about a possible attack on Kirkuk by Kurdish groups supported by Iran, announced that it would view any attack on the Kirkuk-Yumurtalik pipeline as being directed against Turkish interests.

Another Turkish concern was that a possible Iranian victory would cause the disintegration of Iraq and the establishment of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq. On the other hand, Turkish military incursions into northern Iraq in late 1986 to destroy PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) camps there upset Tehran. Iranian leaders were concerned lest Ankara alter the regional power balance to their detriment if Turkey controlled northern Iraq and the oil region of Mosul-Kirkuk.

The PKK was established in the late 1970s to promote Kurdish nationalism. It invoked terrorist actions and armed struggle from the late 1980s. The de facto fragmentation of Iraq after the first Gulf war in 1991 gave momentum to Kurdish nationalist aspirations. Due to a power vacuum in northern Iraq, the PKK was able to establish itself there. In the early 1990s, clashes between the Turkish Army and the PKK intensified.

By that time significant internal and external developments were affecting Iranian-Turkish relations. Turkey confronted the rise of radical "political" Islam, the emergence of a Kurdish separatist movement and the debate it engendered on the Kurdish question, political instability, and severe economic crisis. Meanwhile, in Iran two developments profoundly affected both foreign and domestic policies from the late 1980s: the end of the Iran-Iraq war in August 1988 and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989. Thereafter, throughout the 1990s, Iran's revolutionary policies gradually eroded.

The geopolitics of the Middle East and Eurasia changed drastically because of two major events in 1991: the dissolution of the USSR and the first Gulf war. This, too, profoundly affected Turkish-Iranian relations. With the collapse of the USSR, a common threat to Iran and Turkey disappeared, and with it the centripetal force linking the two countries.

The first Gulf war affected Turkish-Iranian relations in two ways. First, the US began to pursue its "dual containment policy" against both Iraq and Iran. Intended to isolate the two states internationally, the policy posed a huge obstacle to any improvement in Turkish-Iranian relations. Second, the aftermath of the Gulf war was the creation of "safe havens" for the Kurdish people in northern Iraq. This was perceived by both Turkey and Iran as a threat (lest the safe havens evolve into a Kurdish state) but also an opportunity to exert their influence. The power vacuum, ambiguity and struggle for influence in the north of Iraq led to Turkish incursions against the PKK in 1995 and 1997, and confrontation between Turkey and Iran as they took opposite sides in the struggle between the two Iraqi Kurdish parties.

Thus, after almost 70 years, geopolitical changes in the region have caused the reappearance of Turkish-Iranian competition over the Caucasus and Iraq. However, though Turkey and Iran have very different postures regarding the US-led war against Saddam Hussein and the heavy presence of US forces in Iraq, they realize that direct intervention and competition over Iraq will not be tolerated by Washington. Thus they are united in supporting the preservation of Iraq's territorial integrity. Still, the competition between them in promoting their interests in Iraq, for example by supporting rival Iraqi factions, can on occasion be harmful.- Published 18/5/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org


Safa A. Hussein is a former deputy member of the dissolved Iraqi Governing Council. Prior to joining the Transitional Government he served as a brigadier general in the Iraqi Air Force and worked in the military industry as director of a research and development center. Currently he works in the Iraqi National Security Council.

Turkey signed a new security agreement with Iran in 1999. Yet, despite attempts to bring the two states closer, a Turkish National Security Document from 2024 identifies the greatest danger to Turkey as coming from Iran. For the Turkish military, which sets the parameters of discussion at the National Security Council, avoiding closer ties with Tehran is in line with Turkish national security. But this may not be the case with the more pragmatic secular/Islamist political players who perceive a much broader area of interaction in Turkey's fragile relationship with Iran.

Both Iran and Turkey struggle to keep their economic relations separated from and unaffected by their politics. This in fact prevents the more lucrative aspects of their relationship from being sacrificed to their political differences.

In 1958, Gamal Abdel Nasser's radicalism, his triumph against the West in the Suez crisis and his rising popularity threatened the only three non-Arab states of the Middle East: Iran, Israel and Turkey. But a counterstrategy was at hand, enabling the three to contain the Arab threat. This at least was the message of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who paid a secret visit to Ankara in order to convince his Turkish counterparts to join forces in what the literature commonly refers to as the "periphery strategy". In less than two years, a triangle of the three non-Arabs was created.

Israeli experts helped to improve Turkish agriculture while Israeli military advisers struck up close cooperation with the Shah of Iran. In fact, it was the Iranian side that proved to be instrumental in convincing Turkey to join the alliance at a time when Israeli-Iranian ties were much deeper than those between Turkey and Israel; indeed, Israel's influence and involvement in Iran was second only to the United States.

This triangular alliance was broken by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. But as early as September 1980, when the war with Iraq broke out, the revolutionary regime in Iran realized that Turkey was essential for its survival. It also noticed that Turkey provided a unique avenue to the outside world at a time when Iran was surrounded by unfriendly nations.

Still, Turkey's role in the 1980s and 1990s was not vital, other than its continuing function as a major economic player, highlighted by the $21 billion gas agreement that Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan signed in 1996. Compared to other neighbors, relations with Turkey caused few problems for Iran after Ayatollah Khomeini passed away in the summer of 1989. The new leader and the revolutionary establishment in Iran had enough freedom of action since Khomeini, despite his rhetorical critique of Kemalist secularism, had not significantly impeded relations with Turkey. In 1996, Iranian protests against Israeli-Turkish agreements were affected far more by the fear that Israel would now have a common border with Iran than by an increase in strategic power on the part of Turkey.

Soon after the revolution in Iran, Turkey was worried that an Iran in turmoil could create regional vulnerabilities vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. But the ensuing collapse of the USSR reduced this vulnerability. During the war with Iraq, Tehran with its weak capabilities did not prove to be a threat to Turkey either; on the contrary, cooperation on the Kurdish issue proceeded quite well. An agreement between Iran and Turkey in 1984 re-enforced relations to the extent that few PKK attacks had their origin in Iran. Turkey for its part refrained from criticizing Iran for prolonging the war with Iraq because this provided Turkey with more leverage concerning its extensive incursions into northern Iraq.

For Tehran, the war with Iraq took overriding priority over ideals like exporting the revolution. Some have argued that Tehran was not very serious about attacking the secular nature of Turkey by supporting Islamist groups inside the country. Yet this perception contrasts sharply with the behavior of the Turkish military during the tenure of the Islamic Refah (Welfare party) government, when there was deep concern about growing Iranian influence in Turkey. At one point Turkey and Iran briefly recalled their ambassadors and Turkey's deputy chief of staff accused Iran of "producing weapons of mass destruction" and even went so far as to call on the US to list Iran as a "terrorist state".

Most recently, despite ups and downs, a common concern about the creation of a Kurdish state in the region has brought Tehran and Ankara to some sort of unwritten strategic understanding. Both are concerned that Iraq's Kurdish zone--the most stable part of Iraq today--is serving as a support base for Kurdish activists in their countries.

Earlier this month, Iran's Supreme National Security Council secretary, Ali Larijani, visiting Ankara, accused the United States of meeting with PKK representatives in the Iraqi towns of Mosul and Kirkuk. He offered no evidence, but insisted that the US wanted to cause trouble for Iran and support "separatist movements." Similar accusations were directed in the past toward Israel. Insofar as this is an issue of the highest national security priority for Turkey, Iran can stir up trouble between both the US and Turkey and Israel and Turkey.

Moreover, this creates a new obstacle to Turkey's historic desire to join the European Union: both Turkey and Iran are reportedly building up forces around Kurdish zones in Iraq; some Kurdish sources even claim the borders have been sealed.

Larijani's recent visit was not about the Kurdish issue alone; it also led Ankara to increase its initiatives for finding a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear standoff. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul subsequently discussed the issue with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

In this way, Turkey is at one and the same time showing a calculated diplomatic face to Europe, softening relations with Russia and reassuring the US that Ankara remains a friend, while playing the role of a regional player that is not meddling in regional security but rather helping to find remedies. Iran's readiness to transfer uranium enrichment technology to Turkey could also have an impact. Every country in the region is inclined to develop a nuclear capability, and Turkey is no exception.- Published 18/5/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Dr. Jalil Roshandel is associate professor and director of the Security Studies Program at the Political Science Department of East Carolina University. He is currently working on a book project (with Dr. Alethia Cook): US-Iran Relations: Policy Challenges and Opportunities.

The illegal US-led 2024 invasion of Iraq has, predictably, opened a Pandora's box in the region, bringing about unforeseen turmoil among Iraq's neighbors including Turkey and Iran.

From the ashes of the Ottoman Empire emerged the secular Turkish republic under Kemal Ataturk, and--in spite of historical enmity and rivalry--normal relations with Iran. After World War II, Britain and the US allied with them and Iraq and Pakistan against an expanding Soviet Russia, with Turkey seemingly an unsinkable NATO aircraft carrier armed with a million men. Turkey's relations with Iran after Khomeini's 1979 revolution sank, as Tehran quit all western alliances and old strategic and religious suspicions reemerged. Ankara remained by-and-large neutral in the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war.

Now Ankara is returning to the Middle East and Muslim world, a process started by the first ever Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, whose short-lived coalition government was shown the door by the military in 1997. Erbakan had mentored current Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan before the establishment of a less Islamic and more "acceptable" AKP. Turkish-Iranian cooperation was thereby sealed by the visit of Erdogan to Tehran in July 2024, preceded and followed by high-level visits. Bilateral trade and economic ties always remained strong, with Turkey a major transit route through Europe to Iran.

The Iraqi quagmire, incubating ethnic and sectarian civil war and violent chaos, threatens to overflow beyond the borders of northern Iraq (known as Kurdistan), with the US putting Iran in its crosshairs for uranium enrichment (which was legitimate even under the almost-dead Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty apartheid regime). With different strategic perspectives in the region, the US-Turkish NATO alliance has withered.

While uneasy with Iran's mastering of enrichment technology, Ankara now faces a more imminent threat to its territorial integrity in the Kurdish southeast, which is part of the Kurdish highlands straddling Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Kirkuk in northern Iraq, which floats on petroleum and has a substantial presence of Turkomans, Turkey's ethnic cousins, was set aside by the British in 1919 after the ceasefire. Like Washington's Operation Iraqi Freedom, the British also promised the Istanbul's Arab subjects independence--only to subjugate them. Eventually, after a long and bloody resistance, Iraq overthrew the British-anointed Hashemite dynasty to become a secular republic.

Throughout history, ever-disunited Kurds could not create a strong kingdom. Whatever their differences, Ottoman, Persian and Arab empires joined hands to keep the Kurds from uniting, with far-off powers--the British, Russians, and now the Americans--exploiting their aspirations. Today, however, the heady scent of autonomy-towards-independence in north Iraq rouses similar hopes among Turkey's Kurds. Harmonization of Turkey's political structure and laws with EU norms has helped to fulfill many of the Kurds' cultural and linguistic demands, the raison d'etre for the PKK rebellion in the southeast that has cost more than 35,000 lives since 1984, including the lives of 5,000 Turkish soldiers, and laid the region to waste. Still, PKK cadres have sheltered in the northern Iraqi mountains since the end of the 1991 war, and have mounted many attacks inside Turkey, killing soldiers and civilians.

With the US unwilling and unable to take action against the PKK, Turkish armed forces, reemerging again as a force in Turkey's politics, have amassed a quarter of a million troops in its southeast. Before the 2024 invasion, Turkish leaders revived their old claims over Kirkuk, but have not repeated them after seeing the fierce Iraqi resistance. Kurds in northern Iraq reportedly trained by Israel and now the US have been sent to do reconnaissance and stir trouble in Iran, which has retaliated with bombings inside northern Iraq. So, indeed, has Turkey.

Another important change in these equations is the fast decline in Turkish-Israeli ties from almost ally-level, with joint military exercises and defense hardware ties, to a situation where Erdogan, incensed by Israel's meddling in north Iraq, referred to Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank as "state terrorism." Ankara also hosted a Hamas delegation after its recent electoral victory in Palestine. Relations between Turkey and Syria, torn by abiding disputes over the sharing of Euphrates water, Syrian claims to Turkey's Antakya province and Damascus' brief tolerance of PKK training camps in Syrian-controlled Lebanese territory, have warmed, despite the subsequent US disapproval. Turkey, while improving its own relations with Moscow, has not objected to Russia's return to Syria, and has revived Russian military cooperation against vehement Israeli and US protests.

Ankara and Tehran need to cooperate to survive. No one can predict the catastrophic consequences if the civil war sucks in Iraq's other neighbors. Whatever blood Washington might spill, US troops must eventually withdraw. Federations are hair-brained schemes for the region, where the Hama "rule or die" philosophy prevails. The Sunni minority in Iraq has been in control for centuries, much as the 12 percent Shi'ite Alawite elite has ruled over the Syrian Sunni majority since the 1960s. Further, the inner unity of the autonomous north Iraqi Kurdish state, already flexing its muscles through a regional government, army and Kurdish Peshmarga militia, is ephemeral and fragile for all its tall talk.

Whether or not Iraq is to split into Sunni and Shi'ite Arab states, with Kurdistan in the north, will depend on the depth of Iraqi nationalism 80 years on. Only a fierce nationalist Iraqi resistance, with even more bloodshed, can keep Iraq united.

After US war fatigue and retreat, Turkey, Iran, and others (including Russia, now back in the region bearing missiles for Damascus and nuclear plants and military arms, as well as UN Security Council support for Tehran) will have a difficult task in stabilizing the region. If the US implements its irrational military option against Iran, then all bets are off on any predictions for the Middle East and beyond. Did the US foresee the outcome of its ill-planned venture to grab Iraqi oil and control the region's resources? Or, for that matter, did those who initiated the two world wars predict the outcome?

At the end of the day, Turkey seeks to be a conduit for the export of Iran's oil and gas to the West, serving the EU's increasing appetite, and as the only alternative to the Russian gas and oil monopoly. The Azeri and Caspian Sea crude transport to the Mediterranean will close this year due to the US-financed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline--built to keep Russia and Iran out. But this would be just one more East-West strategic fault line.- Published 18/5/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org


K. Gajendra Singh served as Indian ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan in 1992-96. Prior to that, he served as ambassador to Jordan (during the 1990-91 Gulf war), Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies.