MARK ALMOND: An assault on Nato member Turkey may set off a brand new nightmare…

As the Middle East explodes into war, countries that hoped to stay neutral have found themselves dragged into the escalating hostilities.

Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates have all been targeted by Iranian drones and missiles in the past few days as the mullahs lash out against Western-facing interests.

Oil refineries, embassies, military bases and even civilian apartments have all been hit. How, then, will the victims of this Iranian aggression respond? Will they seek to punish Tehran, as the White House hopes?

Or will they resist the temptation and, instead, exert pressure behind the scenes to bring the fighting to a halt?

Long-established conventions and alliances are under extraordinary strain across the Middle East. Whether or not they endure will shape the outcome of this conflict.

The Gulf states

Qatar, Bahrain and the countries that make up the United Arab Emirates have worked hard to avoid involvement.

But their neutrality has been shattered by a barrage of missiles and drones aimed not only at American military bases and embassies on their territory, but at vital energy infrastructure, airports and hotels.

Over the years, Gulf monarchies have spent billions on fighter jets and missiles and – despite pictures of smoke rising over Dubai airport and explosions rocking the Fairmont hotel in Palm Jumeirah and Burj Al Arab tower – those defences have mostly been effective so far.

But the drones swarming from Iran’s launch sites are comparatively cheap – at about $20,000 a piece – and have probably been stockpiled in vast quantities.

The aircraft and missiles required to intercept them, meanwhile, are costly – around $2million a time – and supplies are limited.

If defences in the Gulf states become depleted and more Iranian attacks hit their targets, the consequences will be far-reaching. Will these states join the war against Iran and risk major reprisals?

The US War Department wants the Arab states to let American jets fly through their airspace, for example, which would put them openly at war with Tehran.

But while we in the West worry about Iran cutting off energy exports, the Gulf states fear the Iranian mullahs will block their vital imports of food and drinking water.

Turkey

Turkey has long vied with Iran and Saudi Arabia for supremacy in the Muslim Middle East. Its stance will be crucial.

Despite an historic rivalry – as the two non-Arab powers in the region – Iran has few reasons to antagonise its powerful neighbour. Ankara shares much of Tehran’s hostility towards Israel, for example. Turkey and Iran are united in suspicion of their Kurdish populations. And the Turkish economy depends on Iranian oil.

It is all the more curious, then, that an Iranian missile was intercepted off the Turkish coast on Wednesday.

Was it a ‘stray’ as Turkey has claimed? Or, with so many of Iran’s top military commanders now dead, was it fired by local commanders without much sense of strategy?

An attack on Turkey, a Nato member that shares a 300-mile border with Iran, would mark a major escalation and could activate Nato’s Article 5, potentially drawing the alliance’s 32 member states into the conflict.

Azerbaijan

A fellow Muslim country with a large Shia population, Iran’s neighbour Azerbaijan might seem an unlikely target.

But Iran sees oil-rich Azerbaijan as a hostile state because of its secular outlook and business links with the West and Israel.

Azerbaijan is also regarded with suspicion thanks to its kinship with 20 million Turkic-speaking Azeris inside Iran (many more than live in Azerbaijan) who have been prominent in demonstrations against the largely Persian regime.

It is possible, in fact, that the missile intercepted off the coast of Turkey on Wednesday was heading for the oil terminal at Ceyhan. This is where oil from Azerbaijan – with BP as a partner – reaches the Mediterranean Sea, some of it bound for Israel.

Azerbaijan, with Iran on its southern border and Russia to the north, is also strategically located when it comes to air travel.

Thanks to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, European planes to the Far East have been re-routed over Azerbaijan.

Is Iran now prepared to threaten this narrow strip of airspace in the same way it has attempted to close down the Strait of Hormuz to shipping? Perhaps. Yesterday drones hit an airport and a school, while on Wednesday a missile landed in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan on the Iranian border. Iran has denied responsibility.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s involvement in the conflict with Iran might also seem surprising. Indeed, the two nations have strong shared security interests.

Both oppose the Afghan Taliban, who are fighting a border war with Pakistan.

Further south, the ethnic Baloch minority numbering some 15 million is waging its own bloody campaign for independence from Iran and Pakistan.

But it would be a mistake to overlook the army of Pakistani workers who toil, often for long hours, in the Gulf economies – who now find themselves in the firing line. Saudi Arabia has more than 2.6 million Pakistani workers, while another 1.6 million live and work in the UAE, 400,000 in Dubai alone.

Pakistan nationals carry out many of the menial jobs, but they are also the backbone of private security services in the Gulf.

If any of these expats were to be killed by Iranian missiles, then Islamabad might feel itself forced to act.

The ramifications are chilling – after all, Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia

As the home to the Prophet Muhammad’s birthplace, Mecca, Saudi Arabia stands at the very heart of Islam. Yet Iran’s Shia mullahs challenge Sunni Saudi Arabia’s attempted monopoly on what counts as ‘true’ Islam.

Although Riyadh wanted to remain neutral, Iranian drone attacks on the capital and oil facilities have pushed it closer to reprisals. Iran has hammered oil and gas facilities across the region, bringing production at Saudi Arabia’s largest domestic refinery, Ras Tanura, to a halt on Monday. Riyadh has promised ‘decisive action’ in response.

Relations between the region’s two great petro states have long been difficult.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are engaged in a long-running fight to dominate the Middle East politically and culturally.

Although it doesn’t yet recognise Israel, Saudi Arabia’s alliance with America makes it an obvious enemy for Iran’s mullahs, whose loathing of the US knows no bounds.

Kurdistan

More than 30 million Kurds live in the border areas of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, often as an oppressed minority.

They have spent decades fighting for their own state, ‘Kurdistan’, and – with neither Turkey nor Iran willing to accept losing such large chunks of territory-– the situation was explosive even before America and Israel declared war on Iran.

America has long tacitly supported the Kurds, especially in Iraq. In the past few days,

Iran has sent rockets into Kurdish regions in Iraq, while yesterday, a missile hit the HQ of Kurdish forces in the north of the country.

This followed reports that CIA-trained Kurdish militias have been urged by the Americans to take up arms against Tehran.

What next?

The Gulf states, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia are under huge pressure to respond to the Iranian onslaught – despite the threat Iran will raise the stakes still further in reply. Fortunately, its supplies of weaponry must at some point start to dwindle.

Will Russia come to the aid of its ally Iran? It could do so by attacking Azerbaijan from the north while the mullahs squeeze it from the south – a deeply troubling prospect.

It is, however, the prospect of an Iranian civil war that raises the greatest threat to regional stability. Quite aside from its millions of Kurds and Azeris, Iran has sizeable populations of Balochis and Arabs.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has appealed for Iran’s minorities to revolt. Yet internal warfare could spark a refugee crisis on a scale greater even than the exodus that followed the violence in Iraq and Syria. A nightmarish conflict with tragic human costs is all too possible.

•  Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute in Oxford.