Karen Faulkner
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are working toward forming a “strong foundation” for future, high level “cooperation,” the leaders’ respective national media have reported. The Turkish and Iranian media reports followed a video conference the two leaders held on Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post said.
The leaders of Iran, Turkey have already cooperated closely together with Russia in Syria.
Opposing a US presence in the war-torn middle-eastern county, Erdogan, Rouhani and Russian President Vladimir Putin have sought to undermine America’s position there, even though Turkey has supported Syrian rebels against Russian-backed Syrian dictator Bashir Assad.
Turkey has now bought surface-to-air defense systems from Russia instead of from the US and, when the Trump administration threatened sanctions against it for doing so, Ankara said it would retaliate.
As cooperation between Iran and Turkey is strengthened, the Jerusalem Post notes that the Iranian and Turkish leadership oppose Israel and support the Gaza Strip terrorist group Hamas, an enemy of Israel. Erdogan hosted two high level Hamas officials in Istanbul on August 22 in a meeting that the US strongly objected to; Iran’s extreme hostility to Israel is widely known and reported.
Although the media has not yet been briefed on the topics discussed on Tuesday, it appears Iran and Turkey want to strengthen their political ties, the Jerusalem Post reports.
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