Hamidreza Azizi writes this week that Moscow’s Syria strategy includes helping “Iran and Turkey find common ground on the Syrian crisis and then [it can] concentrate its efforts on further proceeding with a political solution together with Turkey. As such, it could be argued that Iran’s current approach toward the Syrian issue is effectively pursued through the gates of Russia.”
Azizi adds that because “the nature of their [the Turkish-Iranian] relationship in Syria to date can best be characterized as a form of rivalry rather than enmity, points of disagreements could be addressed through the adoption of more pragmatism.”