Iran urges Turkey to cooperate on Syria

“I was there, watching the parade in the Red Square, and everything was the same as the year before,” said Ali Reza Bigdeli, the Iranian ambassador to Ankara, speaking about the Soviet Union’s traditional October Revolution celebrations in 1990. “Yes, there was some unrest around, but the parade was no different to the one in 1989, or in 1979. But only 23 days later, the union collapsed.”

“We saw the disintegration of the the Soviet Union,” Bigdeli emphasized during a press dinner with journalists in Istanbul on Nov. 12. “There is no room to be over-optimistic. It would be too simplistic to think that what has been happening in Egypt, Iraq and Syria could not take place in other countries in the region. The wars are expanding from a national level to a regional level. We all observe that Syria’s borders are under threat right now. Ethnic conflicts in countries [in the region] will inevitably inflict other borders.”

He also said Iran had been urging Turkey "for some time" to work together to contain the crisis in Syria, by "trying to highlight common points rather than discrepancies."

The points in common between Iran and Turkey regarding Syria are quite general principles, such as supporting the territorial integrity, national sovereignty and stability of the civil war-hit country. But there is one big difference in Ankara and Tehran’s approaches.

The Turkish government considers the deposing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to be a must for the stability and unity of the country, while the Iranian government does not. Both President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu have made it clear that the fight against the advances of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria,...