Turkey has been here before. The wars in Iraq, the Syrian civil war, and the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh all put Ankara in a tough spot between its own national interest and the interests of other countries. But the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, which started on February 28 with coordinated airstrikes on Tehran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, is much more dangerous than anything Turkey has dealt with in a long time. This isn't a civil war between neighbors. It is a regional war that could change borders, force millions of people to leave their homes, and make Turkey's eastern neighbor, a country with 92 million people, less stable.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke out against the strikes just hours after the first bombs fell, calling them a "violation of Iran's sovereignty and a threat to the peace of the friendly and brotherly Iranian people." He said he was personally sad about Khamenei's death. At the same time, Ankara sharply criticized Tehran for not understanding the mood in Washington in the weeks leading up to February 28. It also called Iran's missile and drone strikes on Gulf Cooperation Council states in response "incredibly misguided." It was a carefully planned double condemnation, a diplomatic stance. Turkey has been getting ready for this for months, and it shows a basic truth about its position: Ankara is against this war, but it is not on anyone's side in it.
Turkey had been working with GCC countries in the weeks leading up to the strikes to get the Trump administration to agree to a diplomatic solution. Turkish officials had made several offers to both Washington and Tehran, including one to host talks in Istanbul between Erdogan, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Donald Trump. Iran turned it down. Even though the U.S. and Israel had several rounds of talks in Oman that were mostly about Tehran's nuclear program, they still struck. Reports say that the Americans told Turkish officials that the war would be over in four days. It hasn't been.
The Kurdish Issue, Again
The Kurdish aspect of this war is what keeps Ankara up at night the most.
There are about 10 million Kurds living in Iran, mostly in the northwestern provinces that border Turkey and Iraq. The Kurdistan Free Life Party, or PJAK for short, works in this area. It is widely thought to be the Iranian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which has been fighting the Turkish government for 40 years and has killed tens of thousands of people on both sides. If the Iranian state becomes weaker or breaks apart, PJAK could have more room to grow. This would create what Turkish strategic analysts call a "Kurdish belt" that runs from Syria through Iraq and into Iran. This is exactly what Ankara has been trying to avoid for years.
On March 3, things got much worse when reports came out saying that the CIA was seriously thinking about giving weapons to Iranian Kurdish rebel groups to start an uprising in Iran. The reports made the Turkish government angry. Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, asked U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for more information. Rubio reportedly told him that the U.S. would not use that strategy. Later, Trump changed his mind about what he said in public about being "all for" Iranian Kurds taking up arms. He said he didn't want Kurdish fighters from Iraq to join the fight. Matthew Bryza, a former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan, said that Ankara is "very closely" watching this possibility.
Timing is very important. Under what Erdogan calls the "terror-free Turkey" initiative, Turkey has been in a fragile, planned peace process with the PKK. In early 2025, Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK who was in prison, told the group to stop fighting and break up. Progress has stopped, in part because there are disagreements about how to include the PKK's Syrian branch in Syria's national military structure. A Kurdish mobilization in Iran backed by the U.S. could be just the kind of outside shock that caused a previous peace process to fail in 2015. This could undo years of hard work in Turkish diplomacy and start open conflict again in southeastern Turkey.
Turkey has been one of the main beneficiaries of Iran's declining regional power since October 7, which is a sad irony. Hezbollah was weakened, Hamas was under pressure, and Iranian proxy networks across the region were weakened by a series of Israeli attacks. As a result, Turkey stepped in to fill the gaps. It increased its role in Syria, got more involved in negotiations with Hamas in Gaza, and positioned itself as the most powerful non-Arab Muslim country in the post-Iran order. But each step of that growth has made Israel more suspicious of Ankara and raised the risk that Tel Aviv will "set its sights on Turkey," as Israeli analysts have begun to say more openly. Iran needs to be weak but not broken for Turkey. An Iran that is falling apart is a threat in ways that an Iran that is under control is not.
Missiles in the sky over Hatay
On March 4, a NATO air-defense system shot down an Iranian ballistic missile that had crossed Iraqi and Syrian airspace before entering Turkey over Hatay province in the south of the country. There was debris in the Dörtyol district. On March 9, a second missile was shot down over Gaziantep, and on March 13, a third missile was shot down. Incirlik Air Base, which is outside of Adana, was probably the target of at least the first two launches. It is a NATO base that is home to about 1,800 American soldiers and civilians, Polish troops, and between 20 and 50 American B-61 nuclear gravity bombs. The Kürecik radar installation, which is an important part of NATO's European missile defense system, is also located there.
Turkey's answer was calm but very firm. After the second interception, Erdogan told Pezeshkian directly, "There is no reason that the violation of Turkish airspace can be forgiven." Fidan told Tehran that "next time, Turkey will do the same." Iran's new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said that no Iranians were involved in the launches. This was an unlikely claim, but it gave Ankara a reason to deal with the events without making them worse. After that, the U.S. State Department raised its travel warning for southeast Turkey to "do not travel" and told non-essential consulate staff to leave Adana.
It is still not clear if these missiles were meant to hit Incirlik or if they were the result of the IRGC's well-known decentralized command structure, in which field commanders sometimes act without getting permission from the top. I would lean toward the first one. Iranian military doctrine includes a documented pattern of "calibrated provocations" that are meant to test how quickly NATO can respond and make the conflict more expensive for third parties without starting a full Article 5 confrontation. Attacking Incirlik would be very expensive for Tehran. It costs a lot less to send three missiles close enough to make the point.
Turkey has made it clear that it will not allow its land or bases to be used for attacks on Iran. Turkey is in charge of Incirlik, which is a NATO base. Washington can't use it on its own. At the start of the conflict, Ankara closed its airspace to U.S. forces and has always denied reports that Turkish land has been used as a route for American strikes. This is a real limit on what the U.S. can do in the area, and it shows how serious Turkey is about staying neutral and keeping its deterrent value in any future mediation.
The Calculation of Energy
In 2025, Turkey bought about 8.2 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Iran. A contract signed in 2001 lets Turkey buy up to 9.6 billion cubic meters of gas each year. The end of that contract is in July 2026. In 2025, Iran provided about 13 to 14 percent of Turkey's total gas supply. This wasn't a huge amount, but it was still important, especially for businesses and homes in eastern Anatolia where the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline has always been the main source of gas.
Reports that Tehran had stopped sending gas to Turkey came after an Israeli attack on Iran's South Pars gas field on March 24. This field is the largest in the world and produces about 80% of Iran's gas. Turkey's Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar pushed back, saying that storage facilities were 71 percent full and that they were handling supply problems. But 71 percent of capacity means about 4.5 billion cubic meters, and Turkey uses about 230 million cubic meters of gas every day. The buffer is weeks, not months.
Since 2017, Turkey has been working hard to diversify its gas supply, and the war has sped up that process. By 2025, the country's LNG regasification capacity had grown by about five times what it was before 2016. It reached about 151 million cubic meters per day across three floating storage and regasification units and three onshore terminals. In 2024 and 2025, the Turkish state energy company BOTAŞ signed new long-term LNG contracts with ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies. Many of these contracts were based on European gas benchmarks instead of oil prices. This was a deliberate break from the old pricing model used in Iranian and Russian pipeline contracts. BOTAŞ and Mercuria signed a 20-year deal in September 2025 for about 4 billion cubic meters of U.S. LNG to start flowing in 2026.
The numbers tell a clear story. Turkey is using this time when contracts are about to end to lower its risk with both Iran and Russia. It has also renegotiated Russian contracts that cover 22 billion cubic meters through Blue Stream and TurkStream. These contracts are now on rolling annual terms instead of the old 20-year lock-in structures. Ankara wants to cut its pipeline imports from Russia and Iran from 41 billion cubic meters to about 26 billion by 2028. This is a 37 percent drop. The Iran War hasn't changed that plan, but it has made it clear how important it is.
There is another economic aspect that is often not talked about. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline brings Azerbaijani crude to a port on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. It gives Israel about 30% of its oil. This month, the Azerbaijani government said it had arrested Iranian agents who were supposedly planning to sabotage the pipeline. A successful attack on BTC infrastructure would hurt Turkey's economy, make oil markets tighter around the world, and hurt the energy triangle between Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Israel at the same time. Tehran is aware of this. Ankara does too.
The Start of Diplomacy
Turkey is the most likely mediator in this conflict, and for good reason. It is a member of NATO and has a working relationship with the Trump administration. It has ties to Iran's history and religion. It has good working relationships with most of the GCC states and has recently increased its diplomatic presence in the region. For example, Erdogan visited Riyadh and Cairo on February 4 and 5 and made trade and security agreements with both countries. Since the war started, Fidan has been doing shuttle diplomacy at a breakneck pace, talking to 15 foreign ministers in the first two days alone. These included ministers from Iran, the UAE, Oman, and Qatar.
On March 18, 12 foreign ministers from Arab and Islamic countries, such as Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and a few Gulf states, met in Riyadh. The statement that came out condemned Iranian attacks on Gulf states, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, as well as Israeli expansionism in the area. Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey talked about setting up a new security platform for the region. This group, which some call a "new alignment" based on the Riyadh summit in November 2023 that happened after October 7, is now the main way to get Washington to start talks. Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan working together seem to have helped Trump change his mind about attacking Iranian power stations and instead open talks.
That is a real success in diplomacy. But the limits are real too. If Washington stops fighting but Israel keeps fighting, Turkey can't mediate between Iran and the US. The Turkish-Israeli rivalry, which has gotten worse because Ankara has been vocal about supporting Palestinian rights and getting more involved with Hamas, makes it hard for Turkey to play a role in a settlement that needs Israeli support. Iran has refused to negotiate since the end of March, making the most extreme demands and sticking to them. "How far can it go?" In mid-March, Fidan asked publicly from a podium in Ankara. The answer to the question is still unknown.
The longer this war goes on, the more the math changes. If Iran quickly gave up, it would be good for Israel, but Turkey would have to deal with the problems that a weaker and humiliated neighbor would cause in the region. A long-lasting war hurts Turkey's tourism income in the eastern and southeastern provinces, raises energy costs that already high inflation, slows down Ankara's rebuilding projects in Syria, and threatens to destabilize Iran, which would cost Turkey more than any diplomatic success could make up for. Erdogan has called the area a possible "ring of fire." That's not a rhetorical flourish. Ankara sees it as a very accurate picture of the situation.
Turkey has a history of successfully mediating conflicts, such as the 2022 Black Sea grain deal between Russia and Ukraine and the Gaza ceasefire talks. This gives Ankara real credibility in this effort. But it's a different kind of problem to mediate between a NATO ally and a country that is actively firing ballistic missiles at Turkish territory. A Turkish analyst said that geopolitical forces cannot be gotten rid of. They can only be tamed at best. The most important question in regional diplomacy right now is whether Turkey can control this one.