When former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Turkey in 2008, he was warmly welcomed by Turkey’s Islamists, who were angry at the United States over the occupation of Iraq and at Israel over the suffering in the Gaza Strip. Ahmadinejad was embraced as a defiant hero against both.

Today, eight years later, the mood in Turkey is quite different. If the current Iranian president visited the Blue Mosque, he would probably see a wave of protests instead of welcoming crowds. The Islamist media is not full of praises for Iran as an anti-imperialist hero; rather, it strongly criticizes its eastern neighbor as an imperialist power. At the extreme, the distaste with Iran even extends to its dominant sect of Islam, Shiism, in websites or social media accounts that define Shiites as heretics who stab the real Muslims — Sunnis — in the back.

This dramatic change did not happen because Turkey’s Sunni Islamists suddenly became sectarian after a theological soul-searching. It happened because of a major political drama they witnessed: the Syrian civil war. From the beginning of the war in spring 2011, both the Turkish government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan (then prime minister, and now president) and the Islamists in its base focused on the brutality of the Syrian regime over its people — especially the Sunni opposition. When Iran and proxies such as Hezbollah emerged as the biggest protectors of this regime, the anger at Bashar al-Assad and his “Shabiha” turned into anger against Iran and the broader “Shiite-Alevi axis” in the region.

Lately, Iraq added more to this picture. Turkey’s mainstream Islamists have never supported the Islamic State (IS), and rather saw it as an extremist force that puts shame on Islam. Yet at times they “understood” it as a Sunni reaction to the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. The latter’s Shiite militia, especially the Popular Mobilization Units, became notorious in the Turkish Islamist media as a force as brutal as IS and a major threat to the Sunnis of Iraq.