‘Creates More Enemies’: Iran’s War Spreads to Turkey as Analysts Warn Regional Assault Is Strategic Mistake

Turkey became the latest unexpected target in the widening war in the Middle East on Wednesday after it intercepted an Iranian missile, as Iran’s retaliation for joint US-Israeli strikes spreads across the region.

Tehran appears to be betting that hitting countries beyond Israel will ignite regional pressure on Washington to stop its military operation, but Arab and Israeli diplomats say the strategy is backfiring, with the Islamic Republic “creating more enemies.”

Turkey said NATO air defenses destroyed a ballistic missile fired from Iran that was detected over Iraq and Syria and heading toward Turkish airspace. Turkey, a majority Sunni country and a NATO member, shares a roughly 310-mile border with Iran. Two days earlier, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called for “an end to the bloodbath,” describing the war, launched by joint US-Israeli strikes on Saturday, as “illegal.”

Since the strikes that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior officials, the regime in Tehran has expanded its retaliatory missile and drone fire to hit a swath of American allies including Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. 

Iran’s interim national security chief, Ali Larijani, said on Sunday that Iran was “not seeking to attack” regional states and was acting only in self-defense against American bases. But in the days since, Iranian strikes have hit civilian infrastructure including power facilities and hotels across the Gulf.

New figures released Wednesday by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) show Iran has concentrated far more firepower on Gulf neighbors than on Israel in the war’s opening days. Over the first four days, INSS said Iran launched about 200 missiles and about 100 drones at Israel across 123 attack waves. Over the same period, it targeted the Gulf states with about 500 missiles and about 2,000 drones — 2.5 times more missiles and 20 times more drones than it fired at Israel. 

According to Michael Eisenstadt, a military analyst and former US Army officer at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the attacks reflect Iran’s strategy of applying graduated pressure by “catalyzing opposition to the war” in the United States and other countries. Tehran hopes disruptions to oil infrastructure and higher energy prices will create pressure for a ceasefire. 

But nearly every expert called Iran’s Gulf assault a blunder, saying the strikes have caused widespread anger in the Arab world. Six GCC states and Jordan condemned Iran’s attacks as “indiscriminate and reckless” and reaffirmed each country’s right to self-defense. 

Jeremy Issacharoff, a former Israeli ambassador and arms expert, said the Iranian strategy was counterproductive, turning quasi-allies into adversaries. 

“Attacking countries like Qatar that were pretty much positively inclined towards them was a huge mistake,” he told The Algemeiner. “They’ve created more enemies.”

Issacharoff said that Tehran’s leaders frame the conflict through hostility toward Zionism and the existence of a Jewish state in what they see as part of the Islamic world, adding that their driving strategic goal is hegemony. “In the end, they were looking to be much more in control of the region, and of the Arab world as a whole,” he said.

But the region was already moving in the opposite direction of what Iran wants, he said. Years of Iranian-backed missile attacks on Israel by proxy groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon had already pushed several countries to develop what he described as a regional defense mechanism, with Arab states cooperating with Israel and the US under the radar. 

“It’s discreet, but it’s happening,” Issacharoff said, adding that the latest attacks could prompt the emerging coalition to expand cooperation even further, beyond the military arena into a broader framework for regional stability.

Former US Central Command (CENTCOM) communications director Joe Buccino took it a step further, telling Fox News that Iran’s move was a “stunning strategic miscalculation” that could “set the Gulf states on [a] path toward normalization with Israel.”

Abbas Dahouk, a retired US Army colonel who served as a senior military adviser for Middle Eastern Affairs at the US State Department, echoed Issacharoff’s view that years of quiet cooperation had already strengthened a regional coalition against Iran, but he tied the acceleration to a specific turning point: Israel’s inclusion in CENTCOM in 2021, which he said was a “transformative” inflection point that forced regional militaries that once avoided overt ties to “quietly mature counter-Iran plans over years of joint exercises and coordination.”

That groundwork is now showing up in the scale of coordination, Dahouk told The Jerusalem Post in comments published Tuesday, with “hundreds of aircraft” able to operate at once, refuel, strike concealed targets, and counter Iran’s drone and missile networks. He added that Iran’s retaliation has left Gulf states little room to stay on the sidelines. 

“The region must view the Iranian regime as a common threat alongside the United States and Israel,” he said. “At this moment, they have little alternative.”

Former US General Jack Keane also told Fox that the Islamic Republic’s strategy had “backfired.”

“The Gulf states are responding, they’re adequately defending themselves … they’re frustrated with the Iranians,” Keane said, adding that several GCC states were preparing for combat. 

Emirati analyst Mohammad Al Ali wrote in Gulf News that Iran’s only success in this war so far was in “uniting the region and much of the world against them, constructing a vast wall of isolation between [the] regime and the international community.”

Beyond the Arab world, Iran’s strikes have triggered outrage in Europe and led France, Greece, and Britan to deploy defensive military assets to the Mediterranean.

“Iran’s strategy is to sow chaos and set the region on fire,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters on Wednesday, lambasting the Iranian regime for indiscriminately attacking its neighbors.

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski expressed similar sentiments when asked about the Iranian ballistic missile headed into Turkish airspace.

“Iran is broadening the war to countries that did not attack it … there is a well-known saying it’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake,” he said.