Tensions along Turkey's southern flank escalated sharply overnight as sirens wailed over Adana near the İncirlik Air Base — just hours after the first public message was issued in the name of Iran's newly installed Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. A flash of light streaking across the night sky underscored warnings that Turkish security officials had delivered to journalists only hours earlier: Turkey was prepared for further missile strikes originating from Iran or elsewhere, but any such strikes would carry consequences.
Writing in YetkinReport, veteran Turkish political analyst Murat Yetkin frames the moment as a decisive inflection point — one he calls the shift to "Mojtaba Gear."
A New War-Mode Leadership
The question of whether Mojtaba Khamenei is gravely wounded, or even alive, is secondary to the strategic signal his ascension sends, Yetkin argues. The decision by Iran's Assembly of Experts — a clerical body — to elevate him was as much a political and military calculation as a religious one. Known for views considered hardline even by the standards of the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba had long been the preferred candidate of the Revolutionary Guards and Iraqi Shia factions. Yet Yetkin contends he would not have attained the position had his father not become the most prominent martyr of the US-Israeli campaign.
The first statement issued under Mojtaba's name carried an explicit threat: Iran would continue missile strikes unless Gulf Arab states shut down American military bases on their soil.
Shortly after that statement, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian — speaking following calls with the leaders of Russia and Pakistan — outlined conditions for a ceasefire: recognition of Iran's legitimate rights and the payment of reparations. Yetkin identifies this two-track approach as the defining feature of the new Iranian posture. On one track, missiles and drones continue to rain down on Israeli and Gulf Arab targets with the aim of breaking civilian morale; on the other, back channels toward Washington are kept deliberately open. Tehran, Yetkin writes, has correctly read that President Trump wants to enter the November midterm elections having sustained as few American casualties as possible and claiming some form of victory — and is therefore actively looking for an exit from the conflict.
Israel's Miscalculations
Yetkin's analysis is sharply critical of the premises on which Israel persuaded Washington to launch the campaign. According to his account, those premises have now collapsed one by one.
Israel had predicted that eliminating Iran's leadership cadre would cause the clerical regime to implode rapidly. Instead, the regime first dispersed its central structure into a guerrilla-warfare configuration, then rallied around the hawkish symbolism of Mojtaba Khamenei. Israel had also forecast that the opening strikes would trigger domestic opponents to flood the streets and topple the mullahs — a calculation that proved entirely wrong, not least because Israeli support for the exiled Shah's son backfired. A third pillar — using armed Kurdish groups inside Iran and Iraq as a ground proxy force, mirroring the American model in Syria — was stillborn, partly due to Turkish diplomatic maneuvering and partly because Israel had, in Yetkin's assessment, supplied Washington with grossly inflated estimates of those groups' actual capabilities.
Netanyahu, Yetkin notes, is now invoking imagery around the Al-Aqsa Mosque and messianic timelines to sustain pressure from Christian Zionist constituencies in the United States — a move unlikely to reassure Gulf Arab partners already growing weary of the war's trajectory.
Turkey's Balancing Act
Through it all, Yetkin argues, Ankara must hold its current line of "active neutrality." President Erdoğan reiterated Turkey's readiness to host dialogue at a ceremony awarding UN Secretary-General António Guterres the Atatürk Peace Prize — a gesture Yetkin describes as performing the necessary diplomatic motions however distant peace may seem. Meanwhile, a second American Patriot battery was being installed near the radar base at Kürecik in Malatya on March 12, supplementing an existing system at İncirlik, while the Russian-supplied S-400 remains incompatible with NATO's defensive architecture.
With Iran now operating under what Yetkin calls Mojtaba Gear, the analyst warns that the coming days are likely to bring an intensification of the conflict — and that Turkey's strategic interest lies firmly in staying out of it.