That Turkey and Iran are engaged in a heated rivalry for influence in every corner of the Middle East is obvious. This has been going on for centuries, starting in ancient Persia and the geopolitical heartland of ancient Greece, today’s Turkish Aegean region.

To this geopolitical struggle was added a new dimension of rivalry between a Sunni and a Shiite power centers, induced by 15th-century Ottoman-Safavid wrangling. The irony was that this new rivalry was between two Turkish dynasties. In terms of ethnicity, the Safavids who ruled Iran could well be considered more Turk than the Ottoman dynasties, who, for political alliances, married into Christian monarchies and Byzantine remants.

The Turkish characteristics of two neighboring dynasties could not change the imperatives of geopolitics. It was the Safavids who developed Shiism in Iran, at the time majority Sunni. It was during the reign of the Safavids that Shiism became the official state religion of Iran. Since then, Iran has taken its place on the regional and international stage as the hub of Shiite power.

In the era of Qajars, another Turkish dynasty that replaced the Safavids, the Turkey-Iran rivalry continued with instruments of war. In the Ottoman-Iranian wars, today’s Iraq, especially Baghdad, frequently changed hands until 1639, when the struggle ended with the Qasr-i Shirin Accord, which drew today’s Iran-Iraq and Iran-Turkey borders. For 400 years, apart from some modifications, those borders did not change and spawned no irredentist demands from Turkey and Iran.