A close reading of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's April 1 address to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) parliamentary group reveals something beyond the usual sparring with opposition leader Özgür Özel: a significant, carefully worded message directed at foreign audiences. According to political analyst and Yetkin Report editor Murat Yetkin, Ankara's deepest strategic fear is that the US-Israel war on Iran — now in its second month following the surprise strikes of February 28 — could escalate into a full-blown Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict with irreversible regional and global consequences.
After reiterating that Turkey would not enter the war and was doing all it could to promote a negotiated settlement, Erdoğan stated: "One of the biggest dangers facing our region is not only the prolongation of the war, but the risk of it turning into a regional internal conflict. Retaliations targeting energy, transportation, and civilian infrastructure are unfortunately increasing this probability… Every development that leads to the opening of new fronts will serve Israel's bloody strategy and will cause our region to lose."
Yetkin argues in Yetkin Report that the phrase "regional internal conflict" is a deliberate euphemism. The US-Israel alliance striking Iran does not constitute an internal war. When Erdoğan warns of "new fronts," he is addressing the Gulf Arab monarchies — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain — all of which have already been targeted by Iranian retaliatory drone and missile strikes. Erdoğan's warning about retaliatory strikes on "energy, transportation, and civilian infrastructure" is aimed squarely at the Shia clerical regime in Tehran. In short, Yetkin writes, Erdoğan is warning that a sectarian intra-Muslim war would be the single greatest regional catastrophe — and would primarily serve Israel's interests.
Israel, Trump, and the NATO Bluff
Yetkin's analysis in Yetkin Report contends that Erdoğan, without naming Washington directly, believes Israel is deliberately provoking Gulf Sunni monarchies into joining the war against Iran, thereby igniting a Sunni-Shia confrontation. Israel's decision to ban non-Jewish worship in Jerusalem during the conflict, followed by the Israeli parliament's vote on the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners, is presented as confirmation of that provocative logic.
These moves contributed to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni declaring that "Israel has crossed the red line" and barring US bomb-laden aircraft from Italian airfields, and French President Emmanuel Macron taking a similar stance. Trump's threat to withdraw from NATO — telling The Telegraph "I always knew they were a paper tiger" — came in direct response to this European resistance. The bluff did not hold: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer openly pushed back, and Spain has closed its airspace to US military aircraft involved in the war. Yetkin notes that without NATO's geographic advantages east of Gibraltar, Washington would find it exceedingly difficult to sustain operations in the region, challenge a Russia increasingly aligned with China, and simultaneously offer Israel unconditional support.
Trump's April 1 national address — in which he claimed he had "done in Iran what nobody else could do" — reads, according to Yetkin's Yetkin Report analysis, as a private plea to the Israeli lobby and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "Tell me and let's finish this."
The Sectarian Fault Lines
The prospect of a Sunni-Shia conflict, Yetkin argues, would amount to exactly what Trump says he wants to avoid — yet structurally enable. The countries most exposed are Saudi Arabia, which sees itself as the leader of Sunni Islam by virtue of Mecca, and the UAE, which Yetkin suggests has been tempted by the prospect of recovering the strategically located islands of Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunb in the Strait of Hormuz should it retaliate against Iran.
The cascading risks identified by Yetkin in Yetkin Report are significant:
Saudi Arabia hosts an estimated 10–15% Shia population concentrated in the Dhahran area — home to ARAMCO and a US military base — and along the Yemen border where Houthi forces remain active.
Iraq, where Shia Muslims constitute 65–70% of the population, is trying to stay out of the war but its main oil regions border Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iran launched retaliatory strikes on US bases in Iraq.
Pakistan — home to the third-largest Shia population in the world — is simultaneously at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, a regime backed by India, which is allied with Israel.
Bahrain has roughly 60% Shia citizens but is governed by a Sunni royal family backed by Riyadh.
Lebanon, Yetkin warns, may effectively cease to exist as a sovereign state and could be absorbed by Israel if sectarian conflict intensifies across the region.
Iran's Sunni minorities — Kurds, Baluchis, and some Turkmens — remain politically disenfranchised; a Sunni-Shia escalation could reignite Israeli and US attempts to weaponize these groups as ground forces, a plan that has so far failed.
Turkey's Domestic and Strategic Exposure
Inside Turkey, Shia Muslims account for roughly 1% of the population, concentrated near Iğdır, Kars, and Ardahan and in Istanbul, according to Yetkin's estimates in Yetkin Report. The immediate domestic threat is limited. However, if Iran comes under attack from Gulf states, Yetkin cautions that certain militant Alevi groups and militant Sunni factions within Turkey could be incited against one another — a scenario requiring a coordinated political response from both the government and the opposition.
Turkey's core strategic concern, as Yetkin frames it, is more sweeping: a prolonged Iran war feeding sectarian strife would exhaust Muslim-majority populations and states across the Middle East through proxy wars, weakening them collectively while expanding Israel's regional hegemony. That, in Yetkin's assessment published in Yetkin Report, is precisely why Erdoğan — however cautiously — is sounding the alarm now.
Photo: Britannica