The War on Iran and Türkiye’s Migration Anxiety
Alberto Nicelli*
August, 2026
In early March 2026, small groups of Iranians began arriving at the Kapıköy crossing in eastern Türkiye, dragging suitcases through a mountain pass after the bombing began. They were among the first visible signs of a question that had worried Ankara for months. On 28 February, the United States and Israel had launched a joint air campaign against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and setting off weeks of missile exchanges across the region. For a country that shares a 534-kilometre border with Iran, the war revived an old fear, but in a new form. What happens to Türkiye when the state next door begins to crack?
The numbers so far tell a more complicated story than the early warnings suggested. By mid-March the UN refugee agency estimated that around 3.2 million people had been displaced inside Iran, yet relatively few of them crossed any border. Most Iranians stayed close to home, sheltering with relatives or moving toward calmer regions within the country. Poverty, family ties, and the sheer difficulty of leaving kept the predicted exodus from happening. Those who did leave were often dual nationals or people with the means to fly onward, while the poorest stayed put. A ceasefire took hold in April, and by June the fighting had largely stopped while Pakistan mediated talks on a settlement. The wave that some had forecast did not arrive.
Ankara has not relaxed, even so: Türkiye spent a decade as the world’s largest refugee host, its Syrian population peaking near 3.6 million around 2023. The open-door policies it adopted and kept since 2011 later fuelled economic strain and a political backlash that pushed anti-immigrant parties and policies into the mainstream, leaving officials determined not to repeat that approach with Iran.
Days into the war, Ankara’s resolve took concrete form, with Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi setting out three contingency plans, none of which involves opening the door. One would intercept migrants inside Iranian territory before they reach the frontier. Another would create buffer zones along the border itself. A third, kept as a last resort, would admit refugees into Türkiye under tight controls, and the government says it has readied tent camps and temporary sites for up to 90,000 people should that moment come.
Having sent troops into northern Syria in 2016 and 2019 to keep displaced Syrians on the far side of the line, Ankara is repeating a familiar script on its eastern border. The groundwork there is already concrete, with roughly 380 kilometres of wall, more than two hundred watchtowers, and dozens of observation posts built over the past year.
Türkiye’s second preoccupation is economic, and it runs through its energy ties with Iran, which supplies around 13 to 14 percent of the country’s natural gas imports. The war put that link under pressure. After an Israeli strike damaged the South Pars field in March, deliveries to Türkiye were disrupted. Ankara covered the gap by drawing on storage, buying more liquefied gas, leaning on Russian supplies, and increasing output from its own Sakarya field in the Black Sea. The feared energy crisis proved manageable. However, a harder test is coming, since the gas contract between the two countries expires in July 2026 and its renewal looks uncertain to date. A larger shock reached Türkiye indirectly, through oil. When Iran threatened and partly blocked the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes, prices climbed above 100 dollars a barrel. For an economy already worn down by years of high inflation, even an indirect price shock of this kind hurts, whether or not Türkiye plays any direct part in the fighting.
Besides economic fears, there is a quieter dimension that migration scholars tend to flag. Should large numbers ever move, they would not all be Iranians. Iran itself hosts several million Afghan refugees, many of whom could be displaced a second time and pushed toward a border they never meant to cross. This double wave is what Turkish security analysts fear most, since it would fold two vulnerable populations into a single flow that no contingency plan could easily absorb.
How should we read Ankara’s response? Like most of the Western countries, the current language coming from Türkiye frames migration almost entirely as a security threat, something to be stopped at the source. That logic tells us how the Turkish state sees the problem, though it leaves little space for the rights of the people who might be fleeing. A buffer zone keeps would-be refugees on foreign soil and outside the reach of asylum protection, an arrangement that is convenient for the host state and precarious for the displaced. It also shifts the moral and legal burden onto a country at war, far from the scrutiny that European or international institutions might otherwise apply.
For the European Union, the arrangement is a familiar one, going back to the 2016 EU–Turkey Statement, under which Brussels relied on Ankara to hold migrants away from European territory in exchange for substantial funding, plus promises of visa liberalisation and revived accession talks that have largely gone unfulfilled. A new wave from the East would strain that bargain again and hand Türkiye fresh leverage in its dealings with Europe. That’s why European governments, aside from economic impacts, have watched the Iranian war closely, aware that pressure on Türkiye’s eastern border tends to travel westward.
The war on Iran may be winding down, but the questions it opened for Türkiye remain very much alive. A refugee wave that failed to appear once can still appear later, especially if Iran’s post-war order turns out to be fragile. For now, Türkiye is getting ready on its own terms, with hardened borders and contingency plans where it once kept an open door. Whatever Ankara decides, the people caught between a damaged Iran and a wary Türkiye will carry the heaviest cost.
The views expressed in articles published on GAR Blog are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Association for Migration Research.
*Alberto Nicelli is an early-career researcher working on forced migration, EU-Turkey relations and the political economy of the Middle East, and a policy analyst at Geopolis (Bologna). After conducting fieldwork in Istanbul as a visiting researcher at Marmara University for his master’s thesis on the Facility for Refugees in Turkey (FRiT), he now studies how differentiated access to humanitarian social protection shapes refugee civic participation in Türkiye.
