Türkiye sent its number two to a funeral and used the trip to talk about what comes after the war. In Tehran on Friday, Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz met Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at the Saadabad Palace, and used the meeting to look past the rites to what comes next.
In a statement in Turkish after the meeting, Yılmaz said Türkiye would keep contributing to a permanent peace in the region, to stronger channels of dialogue, and to the process of normalization once the war is over. He said Ankara would keep working with its Iranian counterparts to deepen ties across the economy, trade, energy and transport.
That pitch lands at a delicate moment. The war that began with a joint US-Israeli strike on Iran on 28 February 2026 has cooled into a fragile truce, but no final settlement is signed. The two sides are working from a framework reached on 17 June, and Qatari and Pakistani mediators have said the next round of US-Iran talks will come once Khamenei's funeral is over.
Washington's read is upbeat. President Donald Trump said this week that Iran had "agreed to just about everything we need," while holding the American demand to a single line: no Iranian nuclear weapon, and no push for regime change. Tehran's tone is cooler. Iran's UN ambassador told the Security Council his country stays committed to the framework "provided that the United States faithfully fulfils its own obligations."
The hardest knot is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has kept traffic through the strait clamped as leverage, tying a reopening to conditions including a durable ceasefire in Lebanon, while opening technical talks with Oman on clearing mines from the waterway. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil moves through that channel, which is why the strait, more than the nuclear file, is what markets watch.
Türkiye has spent the crisis positioning itself as the party that talks to everyone. Ankara kept lines open to Tehran through months of fighting, coordinated with the Qatari and Pakistani mediators, and has pressed the case for dialogue since the first strikes. It shares a long border with Iran and runs gas and trade across it, so a settlement that reopens the region's arteries pays Türkiye directly.
The gap Yılmaz did not mention is Israel. Israel is not a party to the framework, and the same government whose strike opened the war has given no sign it accepts the terms taking shape. Ankara's bet is that the diplomacy holds anyway, and that when the reconstruction and the deals begin, the country that kept talking to both sides is the one positioned to help, and to profit.