Turkey and a safe zone in Iran is an exchange from January 2026, prompted by a viewer asking whether John Kiriakou had heard the Turkish president say that in the event of an attack on Iran the Turkish army would establish a safe zone inside Iranian territory.[1]
The reading
Kiriakou did not treat the proposal as humanitarian. “They would love that. They would love nothing more than to grab Iranian territory like they grabbed uh Iraqi territory and they grabbed Cypriot territory and they grabbed Syrian territory.”[1]
The list is the argument: three cases in which, on his account, a stated security rationale produced a lasting Turkish presence on someone else’s land. Rall supplied the label — “Pan-Turkism gone wild” — and Kiriakou answered with his own: “The neo-Ottoman government in Turkey is what it is.”[1][2]
The subject nobody discusses
Rall’s closing observation was that pan-Turkism is a topic they should get into properly at some point, because most people are not aware of it — although, he added, a lot of people who watch the show certainly are.[2] The conversation then turned to Barrett Brown, and the promised discussion did not take place in that episode.[2]
Where it sits
The exchange belongs to the same January 2026 conversation in which Kiriakou reported the calls from Arab capitals and from Israel asking Trump not to strike Iran, and it supplies the regional argument those callers were making: that an attack would not stay bilateral, because too many neighbours have standing territorial appetites that a war would license.