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ASAL Research conducted a survey with 2,012 participants, asking, "What should Türkiye’s stance be in the war between Iran and Israel?"
The results showed that 39.6% of respondents believe Türkiye should remain neutral. Another 25.5% think the country should act as a mediator.
Meanwhile, 17% said Türkiye should not support Israel but also keep its distance from Iran. Only 7.5% said Türkiye should side with Iran, while 2.3% believe it should support Israel. The remaining 8.1% had no opinion or chose not to answer.
Türkiye made intensive efforts to prevent escalation between Iran and Israel due to security reasons, a possible migration wave from Iran, and also a power vacuum that would be left if Israel succeeds in eliminating the Iranian regime without a credible alternative. Also, Iran hosts nearly 25 million ethnic Turks in the country's north.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly sought to set up U.S.-Iran talks in Istanbul last week, which failed because Iran's Ali Khamenei, in hiding due to assassination threats, couldn't be reached to approve it, the Axios news site reported.
Unsettled by the long arm of Israel's reach, Erdogan amped up Türkiye's deterrence, ordering the defense industry to increase production of medium- and long-range missiles, saying that Ankara was "making preparations for every kind of scenario."
Israel launched airstrikes on several sites across Iran on June 13, including military and nuclear facilities, alleging that Tehran was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb, a claim vehemently denied by Iran.
While Iran launched retaliatory missile and drone strikes, the U.S. joined the conflict by bombing three Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday. After 12 days of aerial combat between the two regional arch-foes, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a cease-fire between Israel and Iran to end their conflict.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said Iran is now “much further away from a nuclear weapon,” despite intelligence reports indicating that three of Iran’s nuclear facilities were not destroyed in a recent U.S. strike.
Speaking to Politico’s Dasha Burns during the NATO summit, Rubio presented a more cautious view than Trump, who has claimed that the nuclear sites in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan were “completely destroyed.”
“The bottom line is, they are much further away from a nuclear weapon today than they were before the president took this bold action,” Rubio told Politico.
“That’s the most important thing to understand—significant, very significant, substantial damage was done to a variety of different components, and we’re just learning more about it,” Politico cited Rubio as saying.
CNN claimed that a preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that the recent strikes on Iran’s nuclear program delayed its progress by only a few months.
The US intelligence community is expected to release further evaluations in the coming days and weeks, though it’s common for different intelligence agencies to reach differing conclusions in their analyses, according to Politico.
Rubio rejected the media coverage as “false,” saying it failed to reflect the complete situation.
“I hate commenting on these stories, because often the first story is wrong and the person putting it out there has an agenda,” he said.
“That story is a false story, and it’s one that really shouldn’t be rereported because it doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening,” Rubio added.
Israel began its air campaign against Iran's military and nuclear facilities on June 13, striking several of the same sites hit by the US on Sunday.
The US struck the Fordo and Natanz facilities with bunker-buster bombs dropped from B-2 stealth bombers, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said Sunday.
Over two dozen submarine-launched cruise missiles targeted the Isfahan site, he added.
Trump has maintained that the sites "were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it."
"It was my great honor to destroy all nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!" he said on social media Tuesday.
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