Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan poses with his counterparts Hassan Rouhani of Iran and Vladimir Putin of Russia before their meeting in Ankara, Turkey April 4, 2018. (Credit: Kayhan Ozer, Presidential Palace, Handout via Reuters)
“You have incited your abominable Shi’a faction to unsanctified sexual union and the shedding of innocent blood…I, the glorious Sultan...address myself to thee, Amir Ismail, chief of the Persian troops, who…art destined to perish."
- Turkish Ottoman Sultan Selim I to Persian (Iranian) Shah Ismail I
OTTOMANS AND SAFAVIDS
As the Turkish Seljuk empire began to disintegrate in the twelfth century AD, the Byzantine Empire (formerly the Eastern Roman Empire) managed to survive with a rump state around Constantinople. The Seljuk holdings in Anatolia (modern Central Turkey) broke apart into fiefdoms. It was from one of these fiefdoms in northern Anatolia along the Byzantine frontier that a Turkic chieftain arose in the thirteenth century named Osman. After some initial success in capturing Byzantine territory along the frontier, Osman won a major victory against the imperial Byzantine army in 1302, cementing his legacy as the founder of a new kingdom named after him: the Ottoman Empire.
Over the next two centuries, the Ottoman Turks expanded across Western Anatolia, invading Southeast Europe and isolating Constantinople from the rest of Christendom. Finally, after a two-month siege, Osman’s successor, Mehmed II “the Conqueror,” took the prize that the Prophet Muhammad himself had sought. Constantinople fell on May 29, 1453. The last vestiges of the Roman Empire were swept away.
No sooner had the Ottoman Turks taken Constantinople than conflict began with the Persian Safavids in the East. Sultan Selim I began skirmishing with the Persians in AD 1505, routing the Safavids three times in five years. Then in 1514, the armies of Selim and Shah Ismael I met at the Battle of Chaldiran in modern northwest Iran, where Selim won a decisive battle against his Persian foes. The victory allowed the sultan to capture all of modern Turkey, and to begin expansion across the Middle East. By the time of Selim’s death in 1520, the Ottomans had forged a true empire across the Middle East, securing Syria, Western Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Holy Land, Arabia, and Egypt. Selim was succeeded by his son and greater heir, Suleiman the Magnificent, who continued his father’s rivalry with the Persian Safavids. Between 1532-55, Suleiman captured Safavid lands in the Caucus and Mesopotamia, including the prize of Baghdad in 1534. Over the next three centuries, the Ottomans would compete with the Safavids and their Iranian successor empires, trading territory along the frontiers of Mesopotamia and the Caucus region, until the first great calamity of the modern age changed the Turko-Persian rivalry forever.
THE GREAT WAR
As the European and Russian powers gained strength in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire began to lose its hold over southeastern Europe. The rise of European nationalism and militarism in the late nineteenth century set the stage for the first great modern conflict of the twentieth century. As the Ottoman Turks withdrew from the Balkan states, the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires sought to fill the vacuum. Britain and France formed an alliance with Russia, while Austria-Hungary joined with the newly-formed German Empire and the old Ottoman Empire, then considered the “Sick Man of Europe.” After the Austrian crown-prince was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian nationalist in July, 1914, a spark was lit which would draw the entire European continent and beyond into the world’s first war.
The Iranian state, now under the authority of the Qajar family, immediately declared neutrality at the beginning of World War I. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Russia played an influential role Central Asia and the Caucus, including army garrisons in northern Iran. Since Ottoman Turkey and Russia were bitter rivals on opposite sides of the conflict, Ottoman sultan Mehmed V did not see Iran as a truly neutral party, and invaded Iranian Azerbaijan in December, 1914. Known as the Persian Campaign, the Ottomans fought a long war with Iran, Russia and British forces along their frontier between 1914-18. The advantage swung back and forth several times, as both sides leveraged their influence and control over the diverse people groups of the region, including Armenians, Kurds, Cossacks, Assyrians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Caucus Greeks, and various Turkic groups. After the Russian Empire was consumed by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Ottomans managed to consolidate some of their gains in Persian territory. However, their victory would be short-lived. Although the Persian Campaign was going well for the Ottomans in the Fall of 1918, the conflict in Europe and the Middle East spelled defeat for Mehmed’s empire. The British had made stunning progress in Southern Europe towards Constantinople, and in the Middle East, the British and French had already divided the former Ottoman holdings into zones of military occupation. Abandoned by the Germans, and witnessing the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottomans considered the war a lost cause and sued for peace with Britain in October, 1918. An armistice forced the the Ottomans to withdraw from Persian territory that had been captured.
The Treaty of Sevres officially partitioned the Ottoman Empire in 1920, ceding almost all territories not inhabited by Ottoman Turks, and shrinking the Ottoman state to its heartland of Western Anatolia. Constantinople and the coastal areas became zones of influence and occupation for Western powers. But as before, it was from the Anatolian heartland that a new Turkish power would arise. A contingent of the Ottoman military, eventually led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha, refused to accept the humiliating reality of Western occupation, and the Turkish National Movement was born. When Greek forces attempted to invade Central Anatolia, Kemal Pasha’s forces responded with a counter-offensive, igniting the Turkish War of Independence. The nationalist movement set up a rival government based in Ankara, which successfully defended against Greek forces in the west, Armenian forces in the east, and French forces occupying Syria in the south. By the Fall of 1923, the nationalists under Kemal Pasha had managed to recapture most of the territory of modern Turkey. A more favorable treaty was negotiated with Western powers, which included the evacuation of European forces from Turkish land, as well as the abolishment of the Ottoman dynasty. The sultan was deposed soon afterward, Constantinople was renamed to Istanbul, and a secular Turkish state was established under the leadership of Kemal Pasha, who was then hailed as the father of the Turkish nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
THE REPUBLICS OF TURKEY AND IRAN
After the end of the Turkish War of Independence, the ancient rivalry between Turkey and Iran was temporarily restrained by greater geopolitical forces. Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Iranian monarch Reza Pahlavi I were largely secular, moderate leaders who enjoyed cordial relations. A “Treaty of Friendship” was signed between both nations in 1926, and a permanent border between both states was established in 1932. Both nations declared neutrality at the outbreak of World War II, although Iran eventually entered the conflict on the side of the Allies in 1943. Between 1937 and 1964, several more treaties were signed by Turkey and Iran with surrounding nations to establish security cooperation and economic development. Turkey and Iran even became the first two Muslim-majority nations to recognize the nascent Jewish State in the late 1940’s. The world wars had given way to a Cold War, and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and Western powers threatened to divide the Muslim world at times. However, Turko-Iranian cooperation remained largely intact during most of the twentieth century. It appeared that the modern world had finally managed to kill the ancient enmity between the great powers of Persia and Anatolia. However, ancient geographical rivalries never die in this age, they simply lie in wait.
In 1979, a group of Iranian Shi’a clerics and students shocked the world by leading a successful coup d'état against the government of Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. Iran was quickly transformed from a secular monarchy to an Islamic Republic, and its new leading class of ayatollahs considered their success to be a mandate for the spread of their brand of militant Shi’a Islam across the world. Iran began training and equipping proxy armies in the pockets of Shi’a Islam across the Middle East, including Lebanese Hezbollah in the 1980’s. After the regime of Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq in 2003, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard began fomenting Shi’a resistance and political power in Baghdad. Iran also became a staunch ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is a Shi’a in the offshoot Alawite sect.
While the Iranian state was radicalizing and its influence expanding, Turkey remained a largely secular democracy in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, despite the occasional military coup for the purpose of restoring political order. However, in the 1980’s, a new political star began to arise on the streets of Istanbul in Turkey. After joining the Islamist “National Salvation Party” in the 1980’s, Recep Tayyip Erdogan rose through the party ranks to become the mayor of Istanbul in 1994 until his brief imprisonment in 1998. Erdogan learned how to hide his Islamist aspirations within the veneer of a conservative political movement, forming the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001. It was a huge success, as AKP candidates swept one-third of Turkey’s parliamentary seats in 2002 elections. Erdogan was elected Prime Minister shortly afterward in 2003. Capitalizing on a cultural trend of neo-Ottoman revival, Erdogan and his fellow AK party leaders espoused the virtues of Islam in Turkish society while boasting of Turkey’s historic role of leadership in the Middle East for over 500 years. After the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, Erdogan began implementing a policy of expansionism which would bring the resurgent Turkish state into tension with a revolutionary Iranian regime for the first time since World War I.
In 2011, the Turkish government, a member of NATO, agreed to host a large, advanced anti-missile system inside its borders. The arrangement upset the Iranian government, which saw the missile shield as a direct threat to its ability to respond to an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Turkish military also began sponsoring rebel forces in the Syrian Civil War, putting Erdogan’s government at odds with the Iranian regime, which supports the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. The presence of Kurdish militias in northern Syria gave Erdogan a pretext to invade Syrian Kurdistan three times between 2016-19, while Turkey has built military outposts and conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Iraqi Kurdistan over the last five years, ostensibly as a means of confronting the same Kurdish militias there. These military expeditions have brought the Turkish army in dangerous proximity to the ongoing work of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has built a pipeline of fighters, weapons and supplies that passes through Iraq and Syria to the doorstep of Israel in the Golan Heights. The presence of Iranian and Turkish military activity in the same theaters of conflict while in support of opposing forces is a recipe for direct military confrontation, even war.
Despite the growing potential for conflict, the Islamist republics of Turkey and Iran remain in cooperation with each other at the highest levels. A mutual disdain for the West and a shared economic agenda have kept diplomatic ties strong. Turkish president Erdogan and Iranian president Ibrahim Raisi recently concluded a summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin in July, 2022 for the purpose of negotiating the Syrian conflict. Both nations are also the two main patrons of the Palestinian Hamas movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is violently opposed to the existence of the State of Israel. However, as the history of the Turko-Iranian rivalry has demonstrated again and again, the presence of political goodwill and economic trade is not powerful enough to overcome the animosity created along the frontiers of two expansionist kingdoms, and the inertia of historical forces are bound to pull ancient geographical rivalries back into their familiar state of conflict. It is not a matter of whether the Goat and the Ram will once again violently butt heads, but when.
