Iran’s Foreign Ministry has rejected Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s comparison of Tehran’s regional policy with Israel’s actions, describing the analogy as “astonishing” and urging Ankara not to repeat narratives that could serve Israeli interests.
Speaking at his weekly press conference on Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei responded to remarks by Fidan, who said: “Iran has claimed for a long time that it was pursuing a pre-emptive security policy by maintaining proxies in these countries, just as Israel occupies parts of the region in the name of security,” News.Az reports, citing Iran’s English-language Press TV.
“It is astonishing that someone like Mr Fidan would make such an incorrect comparison,” Baghaei said. “He himself knows that the Zionist regime is inherently expansionist and seeks to undermine the entire region, including Türkiye. We wonder how he arrived at such a strange comparison.”
Rejecting Fidan’s characterisation of Iran’s regional role, Baghaei added: “Iran has no proxies in the region. The only proxy in the region is the Zionist regime.”
He urged Turkish officials to ensure their assessments reflected realities on the ground.
“We ask our Turkish friends to align their analyses with the existing realities and refrain from repeating analyses that could be exploited by the Zionist regime in pursuit of its expansionist and criminal policies,” he said.
The exchange followed comments by Fidan in which he condemned what he described as the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran and Israel’s military operations across the region, while also saying that Iran’s strikes on US and Israeli targets were unacceptable.