In recent months, Ehsan Hosseinzadeh, like many Iranians in the diaspora, had come to believe that foreign military intervention was necessary to help his people overthrow an Islamic regime that was oppressing and massacring innocent civilians. But a week after Israel and the United States launched a war in his home country, the 38-year-old refugee in France is worried that the conflict will draw in regional powers, to the detriment of Iran and its citizens.
Hosseinzadeh has every reason to fear a conflagration breaking out along ethnic, religious and civilizational fault lines that could open the wounds of history in an ancient land.
Born in Urmia – a city in the far northwest of Iran that shares borders with Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Iraq – Hosseinzadeh understands a thing or two about the explosive mix of identity and grievances.
Hosseinzadeh, an ethnic Azeri (also called Azerbaijani and Azerbaijani-Turk in Iran), belongs to the largest minority community, making up about 24% of Iran’s 93 million people. Its birthplace is also home to a significant Kurdish population, as well as Armenians and other minorities who have lived in lands where the borders of empires and republics have changed over time. The tangle of history can sometimes turn the region into a diplomatic trap for political leaders.
So on Thursday, when Azerbaijan accused Iran of a drone attack on its territory that injured four civilians and vowed to retaliate, Hosseinzadeh was on high alert. The drone hit an airport building in Nakhchivan, a landlocked exclave of Azerbaijan that borders Iran, Türkiye and Armenia. It was a sinister event.
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“You can see that tension is rising. And there is also the ethnic factor. I’m not sure, but I can predict that if an ethnic conflict arises in that region between the Turkish people and the Kurdish people, both Baku and Ankara will have a tendency to intervene, to play their cards there,” he said, referring to the Azeris, a Turkic people, as “Turkish people,” in a telling sign of the complex mix of linguistic identity in the region.
Turkey – which shares a nearly 500 kilometer border with Iran drawn in 1639, making it the oldest continuously managed border in the Middle East – is at high risk of a regional conflagration. A shared border, an ethnic group on both sides of a border, infrastructure and business interests on both sides – all of which could leave Turkey facing economic and refugee crises.
On Wednesday, NATO air defense systems destroyed a ballistic missile launched from Iran and heading towards Turkish airspace. Türkiye, NATO’s only Muslim-majority member, hosts the Incirlik base, which is believed to have American nuclear weapons. The next day, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a televised speech, warned that the Iran war had raised tensions in the region to a “terrifying level.”
‘Ankara’s nightmare scenario’
Türkiye and Iran have a long history of rivalry and competition and have at times supported opposing proxies, especially in Syria and Iraq. But bilateral relations between Ankara and Tehran have remained strong, based on mutual economic interests and internal imperatives to contain the Kurds. Like Turkey, Iran also has an oppressed Kurdish minority comprising between 10 and 17% of the population living in areas also inhabited by Azeris.
But after Operation Epic Fury exposed the Trump administration’s epic failure to calculate the consequences of war, Washington made a high-profile outreach to Iranian Kurdish armed groups based in the Iraqi semi-autonomous zone. The Kurds, who have a long history of being “hung out to dry” by Washington, have so far not taken the American bait. But they are aware that President Donald Trump has given them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in their historic resistance to the regimes in Tehran.
Read moreThe United States reaches out to Iran’s Kurds, but will they be “hung to the curb”?
If that opportunity is seized, Türkiye could become involved in war with Iran, experts warn. “Türkiye is in a bind,” explained Guney Yildiz, senior advisor on geopolitics and strategic insights at Anthesis-Wallbrook Group. “It just resolved its own 40-year Kurdish war,” he explained, referring to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)’s decision last year to disband, disarm and engage in a peace process. “And now a CIA-backed Kurdish uprising is emerging on its eastern border involving the PJAK (Free Life Party of Kurdistan), linked to the PKK network. That is Ankara’s nightmare scenario.”
In the weeks before the start of the war against Iran, as Trump’s US military “army” deployed to the region, Turkey launched a frantic diplomatic effort to avoid a conflict. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan reached out to the United States, Iran, Oman and other Gulf countries, as well as Turkey’s other Western allies, in an attempt to explain the high-risk consequences of a conflict for Ankara. The effort failed.
As the United States moves closer to the Kurds, Ankara has been put on alert, explained Shukriya Bradost, a Middle East security expert and doctoral researcher at Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs. “Erdogan is going to be watching this closely. He obviously doesn’t want a Kurdistan in Iran,” similar to the semi-autonomous Kurdish zone in Iraq, Bradost explained. “Obviously it could reach the Azeris (Iranians) and it is also very close to Baku,” he added.
Transit corridors, pipelines, competition and cooperation
Türkiye and Azerbaijan share close ties rooted in common linguistic and cultural foundations that have deepened with economic and military cooperation.
During the 2020 Azerbaijan-Armenian war over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkish drones and military advisors were instrumental in delivering victory to Baku. Iran, a country that has cordial relations and an open border with Armenia, has traditionally used its relations with Yerevan to contain Turkish-Azerbaijani ambitions in the South Caucasus region. But with Armenia’s defeat, Tehran emerged from the conflict diplomatically weakened.
Meanwhile, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been repairing ties after the 2020 war. A recent agreement between the two countries for a transit corridor linking Azerbaijan to the Nakhchivan enclave – called the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” – has further marginalized Iran in the region.
Economic risks in Iran’s northwestern region are also high for Türkiye, which receives more than 15% of its natural gas from Iran via the Tabriz-Ankara gas pipeline.
But the US-Israel war against Iran threatens to shake up the intricate web of interests and critical economic corridors that maintain stability in the South Caucasus region.
If Azerbaijan, emboldened by its ally Türkiye, tries to mobilize Iranian Azeris, it could touch a particularly sensitive ethnic fault line in northwest Iran, experts warn. “The risk is that Iran’s western provinces become a proxy space where Turkey backs the Azeris and the United States backs the Kurds, further fragmenting the Iranian opposition exactly at the moment it needs cohesion,” Yildiz said.
Hopes fade, but not completely
The Iranian province of West Azerbaijan, of which Urmia is the capital, has long been home to a mixed population of mainly Shia Azeris and Sunni Kurds.
The Azeris, the Turkish group that produced the Safavid and Qajar dynasties before the Pahlavi dynasty came to power, were an influential group that integrated with Iran’s Persian majority. Their fortunes foundered under the Pahlavis, a regime vilified by ethnic minorities as Persian supremacists.
With the 1979 revolution and the seizure of power by the Islamic regime, the Azeris returned to the national mainstream. Under the Shiite Islamic regime in Tehran, Azeris are an ethnic group highly integrated into Iranian society. The late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was Azeri, and the community is considered the Shiite brethren of Iran’s ethnic Persian majority, which makes up more than 50% of the population. “They have international support from neighboring Turkey and Azerbaijan, and within Iran they are also powerful, because they have been part of the system: the political, economic and security structures,” Bradost explained.
The Kurds, by comparison, have fared poorly under Shiite authorities. But they are the most mobilized ethnic group in Iran, and many Kurdish parties have armed groups based in neighboring Iraq.
A collapse of central authority could ignite an ethnic tinderbox between the two communities that have historic land disputes.
For Hosseinzadeh, who has family in the region, it is a nightmare scenario. “I am very worried about a very big ethnic conflict there, because, as I understand it, there is little or no dialogue between the two ethnic groups. And there are very extremist people on both sides. In the Kurdish camp, there are people who say that all of Azerbaijan (region of Iran) is our territory and this is part of Kurdistan. And there are also people in the Azerbaijani (or Iranian Azeri) camp who say that we have to join Azerbaijan or Turkey,” he explained Hosseinzadeh.
For almost half a century, the Islamic regime in Tehran maintained that it was the only guarantor of stability in the country. Hosseinzadeh, an Iranian lawyer and ardent defender of democratic rights, is at pains to point out that he does not echo the propaganda of the Islamic regime. “The regime warns people about chaos. They say that if the regime falls, we will fall. I am not repeating that perspective,” he stressed. “The Islamist regime has to go. We’ve had 47 years of that, that’s enough. But there are very big and serious concerns in Iran and we have to be careful with those growing conflicts.”
After years of defending human rights and waiting for foreign help to realize his vision for Iran, Hosseinzadeh today seems anxious after sleepless days trying to communicate with loved ones at home and following the news. “My wish was, and is… but it’s getting a little pale,” he says worriedly and tiredly before starting again. “My desire was to bring democracy, a federal democratic government based on human rights for all the people of Iran, not for the supremacy of the Persian people, for all ethnicities,” he emphasizes. “And now we are moving away from that, with the danger of bombings, ethnic conflicts, foreign actors… it is a shame and it is worrying. But let’s see what will happen in the future.”
