Iran, Turkey’s close trading partner and neighbour to the northwest, has joined the chorus, but the stakes for it are fundamentally different. Iran can help bring together the Syrian Kurds, the Syrian Govt., and Turkey so that the Syrian Army together with Turkey can guard the border,” Zarif tweeted, summing up his suggestions in an interview with Ankara’s state-run news channel TRT World. As the Turkish invasion of northern Syria, dubbed Operation Peace Spring, entered its third day on 11 October, Iranian hard-liners voiced a relatively hardened stance against it. Tehran clearly does not want Syrian Kurds to act as a role model for its restive Kurdish population along the border with Iraq. This provides further motivation for the Islamic Republic to hold Shia militia forces back and let its Turkish and Kurdish rivals in Syria bleed each other as dry as possible.

Source: The North Africa Journal October 12, 2019 18:33 UTC