Small Countries, Big War

The long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh has created partnerships in the South Caucasus that cut across religious, ethnic, and geopolitical lines in surprising ways. Iran, which is ruled by Shiite clerics, has provided an economic lifeline to Christian-majority Armenia, whose primary backer has long been Russia. Meanwhile, Israel and Sunni-majority Turkey have formed a strategic alliance with predominantly Shiite Azerbaijan. And the two Shiite-majority countries in the mix, Iran and Azerbaijan, remain locked in a bitter, decades-long dispute over territory and identity.

For almost three decades, with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict frozen in a stalemate, this configuration was mostly seen as a case of politics making strange bedfellows: curious, but not a cause for alarm. In 2020, however, the momentum in the conflict shifted decidedly toward Azerbaijan, which won a clear-cut military victory over Armenia during a short but consequential war over the territory. That outcome is slowly but surely heightening, to dangerous effect, inherent but long-hidden tensions among the players in the region. All of this is taking place as Russia, which has traditionally been the most important outside actor in the conflict, has been distracted by its faltering war against Ukraine.

Meanwhile, as Israel’s ties to an emboldened Azerbaijan have deepened, Iran has become concerned that Israel is turning Azerbaijan into its proxy and using it as a launchpad for operations against Iran. In recent years, Iran has watched as Israel and the Persian Gulf Arab monarchies have grown closer, owing to a shared enmity toward Tehran. The Iranians now fear that a similar dynamic is taking shape between Israel and two countries with predominantly Turkic populations, Turkey and Azerbaijan. The perceived threat of being sandwiched between an Israeli-Gulf Arab bloc to the south and an Israeli-Turkic bloc to the north, combined with domestic unrest in Iran, could tempt Tehran to overtly enter the conflict on the Armenian side and try to destabilize the Azerbaijani state. Meanwhile, an increasingly self-assured Azerbaijan might seek to arm and stoke separatism among the Iranian Azeri population. Such steps could lead to an escalatory spiral that would threaten the stability of the strategically vital South Caucasus and potentially produce a wider crisis.

TURF WAR

The fight over Nagorno-Karabakh has simmered for decades but has generally been treated as something of a geopolitical sideshow. During the Soviet era, the roughly 1,700-square-mile region was an autonomous oblast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic; today, it is internationally recognized as part of the Republic of Azerbaijan, which fully surrounds it. But Nagorno-Karabakh’s population has long been predominantly Armenian, and after the breakup of the Soviet Union, fighting erupted between Azerbaijan and local Armenian forces heavily supported by Russia. In 1994, Russia brokered a cease-fire, and for the next 25 years or so, a stalemate held in which forces backed by Armenia and Russia effectively controlled the territory. In 2020, however, a second war broke out, and this time, Azerbaijan won a decisive victory, ejecting Armenian forces from Azeri-dominated districts that Armenia had occupied and leading to a fragile Russian-brokered cease-fire.

One reason for that victory was Israeli aid. Since 2016, Azerbaijan has received nearly 70 percent of its arms imports from Israel, which in turn purchases 40 percent of its oil from Baku. The Iranians, however, believe that Israel gets something else out of the relationship, as well.  According to multiple press reports, major Israeli operations against Iran, including the 2018 theft of information concerning its nuclear archive, were conducted with the assistance of Azerbaijan. Additionally, Iran claims that Azerbaijan has allowed Israel to smuggle weapons to Iran and offered up its airfields for Israeli drones to operate inside Iran. Baku has denied such reports and announced that it will not allow Israel to use Azerbaijan as a launchpad to attack Iran. But Iranian leaders and military officials have repeatedly warned that they will not tolerate this alleged enemy “nest.”

Meanwhile, Iran has expressed alarm over one potential outcome of Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh. Baku is currently demanding that Yerevan agree to the establishment of a corridor through Armenian territory that would connect Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan, an exclave of Azerbaijan jammed between Iran, Armenia, and Turkey. In January, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev called this passage “a historical necessity . . . [that] would happen whether Armenia wants it or not.” Such a corridor would cut off Iran’s access to Armenia, because the two countries would no longer share a border. Iran views Armenia as a critical link with Eurasia and has threatened to use military force against any changes to the internationally recognized borders of the region. During a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last July, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned against creating a barrier between Iran and Armenia by blocking what “has been a communication route for thousands of years.”

DUELING NARRATIVES

Over the past two years, the Iranian regular army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have conducted large-scale military drills along the border with Azerbaijan and practiced crossing the Aras River, which separates the two states. In response, Azerbaijan and Turkey have launched joint military exercises on the northern side of the river. Iran’s anxieties have been heightened further by reports that Turkey brought to Azerbaijan hundreds of extremist mercenaries from Syria to help during the 2020 war against Armenia.

The close ethnic ties between Iran and Azerbaijan lend additional complexity to this emerging conflict. Although Azerbaijan has a linguistic affinity with Turkey, Azerbaijanis tend to identify less with ethnic Turks than they do with Iranians of Azeri ethnicity, who make up Iran’s largest ethnic minority group and about 20 percent of its total population. More Azeris live in Iran (15 million to 20 million) than in Azerbaijan (about ten million). Iranian Azeris have played central roles in Iran’s history, economy, society, and politics, including during the 1905 constitutional movement and the 1979 revolution. Azeris on both sides of the border often point out that Khamenei’s father had Azeri heritage.

Many Azerbaijanis believe that the area they consider “Greater Azerbaijan” has unfairly become a pawn in a geopolitical contest between Iran and Russia. The portion of this area that lies north of the Aras River gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and is today the Republic of Azerbaijan), whereas the area to the south of the river remains under Iran’s control. In this view, Greater Azerbaijan is a nation that has been divided by history and awaits its rightful unification.

To Iran, however, the “Republic of Azerbaijan” is a misnomer applied to the wrong region. The name “Azerbaijan” has historically been used by Iranians to refer to those lands south of the Aras, which are currently divided into several Iranian provinces. Iranians point out that what is today the Republic of Azerbaijan was once controlled by Iran, which lost it to the Russian Empire during several wars that ended in two humiliating treaties in 1813 and 1828, which forced Iran to cede its vast territories in the Caucasus. These territorial losses have been subsequently ingrained into the Iranian national psyche and collective memory, vividly and painfully reflected in Iranian poetry and even daily political rhetoric.

TALKING TOUGH

Since the end of the Cold War, Iran and Azerbaijan have deployed their religious and ethnic identities to project power into each other’s territory. Baku now accuses Tehran of trying to “Lebanonize” Azerbaijan by fostering Hezbollah-like militant Shiite organizations in Azerbaijan. Last November, authorities in Baku arrested members of an armed group allegedly trained by the IRGC in Iran and Syria. Meanwhile, Tehran accuses Baku of aspiring to “Balkanize” Iran by backing separatist movements among Iran’s ethnic Azeri population. A week after the arrests in November, Iran announced that a member of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) traveled from Baku to Tehran with an Azerbaijani passport to organize a recent deadly attack in the southern city of Shiraz.

Tensions further increased in January when a gunman stormed Azerbaijan’s embassy in Tehran, killing its security chief and wounding two others. Baku called it “a terrorist attack” and evacuated the embassy; Iranian officials insisted that the attacker had personal motivations rather than political ones. Then on March 28, an anti-Iran Azerbaijani lawmaker survived an assassination attempt. The next day, Azerbaijan opened its embassy in Tel Aviv, becoming the first Shiite-majority country to post an ambassador in Israel.

Since its 2020 victory over Armenia, Baku has adopted an unusually aggrieved tone on Iran. Last fall, Aliyev stated that relations with Iran had never been so poor. “We will do everything to protect our lifestyle and the secular development of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis, including Azerbaijanis in Iran,” he said. “They are a part of our nation.” A number of Azerbaijani commentators have called for the separation of “South Azerbaijan” (the name they give to the Azerbaijani region of Iran), and last November, an Azerbaijani TV channel reported that a committee of exiled Iranian Azeris had met with Azerbaijani parliamentarians to discuss forming an “interim parliament of South Azerbaijan.”

For their part, commentators in Iranian media claim that many citizens of Azerbaijan, including a group called the Nakhchivan People’s Movement of Iran, oppose Turkish and NATO influence in the Caucasus and want to rejoin their Iranian “motherland.” Iranian authorities have also accused Israel and Turkey of rewriting history to help the government in Azerbaijan promote a secular Turkic Azerbaijani identity that would further distance Azerbaijanis from what Tehran sees as their historical place in Iranian civilization and Shiite culture and instead pull them closer to Turkey. In July, Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan wrote in a tweet that reading a book titled Mysterious Tales of Tabriz had taught him “so much about Azerbaijani history and culture in Tabriz.” Tabriz is Iran’s fourth-largest city and the capital of its East Azerbaijan province. In response, his Iranian counterpart in Baku tweeted: “For the information of this adventurous boy: Our beloved #Tabriz is known as the land of FIRSTS in #Iran’s proud history. Apparently, the FIRST Evil Zionist is going to be buried by the zealous people of Tabriz, too. Never cross our red-line, ever!”

The cease-fire between Armenia and Azerbaijan is faltering.

These tensions have been growing in the context of unrest in Iran, which started last September after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was in the custody of the morality police. The profound state-society conflict that has ensued since then may provoke the regime to look for a diversionary battle. The Islamic Republic’s domestic unrest could also signal weakness and embolden Azerbaijan’s adventurism against Iran.

Meanwhile, the cease-fire between Azerbaijan and Armenia is faltering, with both sides clashing over control of a stretch of land that connects Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. If war between Armenia and Azerbaijan breaks out again, Iran will likely provide more overt support to Armenia than it has in the past because the stakes are now much higher. Last October, a top IRGC commander and military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader stated that Armenia had expressed interest in purchasing Iranian drones. Additionally, Azerbaijani media sources have reported that, since last fall, Iran has provided antitank missile systems and missiles to Armenia—although Yerevan denies these allegations.

In one potential scenario, Iran might choose to conduct missile and drone attacks on what the Iranian government claims are Israeli bases in Azerbaijan, similar to operations it launched in recent months against Israeli “strategic centers” in the Kurdish-dominated regions of Iraq. (Iraqi Kurdish officials have denied the claim that such bases exist.) Then, Azerbaijan and Israel—perhaps with the cooperation of Turkey—might seek to foment an insurgency among ethnic Azeris in Iran, which could, in turn, provoke the Iranian military to venture into Azerbaijan itself.

For now, such a sequence of events remains purely hypothetical. But what is not hypothetical is the potential for a conflict in the South Caucasus to spiral into a crisis, one that could drag in the United States and NATO (on the side of Azerbaijan, Israel, and Turkey) and Russia (on the side of Armenia and Iran), thus opening another fault line in the West’s troubled relationship with Russia and solidifying an emerging military partnership between Tehran and Moscow.

In an effort to reduce tensions, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has held trilateral talks with Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. He has also asked Aliyev to immediately reopen a commercial road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia in order to prevent a humanitarian disaster. European Council President Charles Michel has had telephone conversations with both leaders, as well, urging them to refrain from further escalation. But until the international community realizes how this conflict between two small countries could turn into a crisis with global implications, a breakthrough remains unlikely.