It is hardly a secret that Turkey and Iran are regional rivals along the Sunni-Shiite divide in the Middle East, which only deepened with the failed Arab Spring. Yet rarely has the animosity spilled over into open and bitter verbal sparring.
That is what we see happening now after the latent animosity toward Iran in Turkey surfaced unexpectedly and at the highest level, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Tehran recently of pursuing “Persian nationalism” in Syria and Iraq.