Officials in Ankara were awake and concerned in the early morning hours of Jan. 3, after a US strike near Baghdad's airport killed top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. Yet 18 hours after the strike, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still silent.
Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin called on “all sides to remain calm and avoid steps that will fuel tensions.” Reactions from Ankara were cautious and concerned, with suggestions that tools of diplomacy be used following the killing of Soleimani, who was the head of the Quds Force, a powerful elite branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). A Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement noted, “Turkey has always been opposed to foreign intervention, assassinations and sectarian conflict in the region.” This rather neutral statement took 10 hours to publish.