Iranian President Pezeshkian visits Azerbaijan

On Monday, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev received his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian in Baku. It was the first visit to Azerbaijan by an Iranian president in six years.

Pezeshkian, whose position as president is subordinate to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khameini, visited at Aliyev’s invitation.

According to an official readout of the meeting, the two presidents spoke about a number of fields of cooperation, particularly focused on energy.

Before the visit, Pezeshkian gave an interview to the Azerbaijani state-run media outlet AZTV, during which he spoke about stability in the region and territorial integrity.

‘First, everyone should be satisfied with their territory and not look at the lands of another state. Conflict arises when a neighboring country is not satisfied with its territory’, Pezeshkian said.

In the interview, he was also questioned about the ‘Zangezur corridor’, an Azerbaijani demand for control of a strip of land through Armenia to link mainland Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan.

In response, Pezeshkian said that ‘communication with Nakhchivan will not be a problem for Azerbaijan, because Iran supports the connection between Nakhchivan and another part of Azerbaijan through Iran’s territory’.

He was referring to the North-South transport corridor, which is envisioned to connect mainland Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan via Iran.

The relationship between the two countries has remained tense for years, complicated by bilateral issues, such as the presence of a significant minority of ethnic Azerbaijanis in Iran, as well as larger geopolitical factors, namely Azerbaijan’s close ties with Israel and Iran’s warm relations with Armenia.

Within this already rocky relationship, there have been significant upticks in tensions, such as the attack on the Azerbaijani embassy in Tehran in 2023. As a result, Azerbaijan shuttered its embassy in Iran — there was also an increased crackdown and widespread arrests of Shia Muslims, which many connected to the attack and wider bilateral issues with Iran.

Earlier in April, the Washington Post reported, citing sources, that Iran had hired a Georgian national of Azerbaijani descent to assassinate a prominent Baku rabbi. Although the plot was ultimately thwarted by Azerbaijani security forces, it prompted some pro-government media outlets to say that Iran was ‘playing with fire’.

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