Azerbaijan-Turkey hold first joint drills with since Karabakh victory

The first combined military drills between Azerbaijan and its close ally Turkey were announced on Monday. Baku’s takeover of the breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh last month forced the majority of the province’s ethnic Armenian population to evacuate. In a statement, the defense ministry of Azerbaijan stated that exercises bearing the name of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, were being attended by up to 3,000 military troops. It said the drills were being held across Azerbaijan, including in Baku, the Nakhichevan exclave which borders Turkey, and in what the ministry called the “liberated territories” of Karabakh. Turkey has close linguistic and cultural links to Azerbaijan, and offered Baku military and political support during its three decade-long conflict with Armenia, with which Ankara has no formal diplomatic relations. Armenia and Azerbaijan have recently signalled willingness to sign a peace treaty formally ending their conflict following Azerbaijan’s victory in Karabakh and the exodus of almost all the region’s 120,000 ethnic Armenians. The foreign ministers of the two countries, along with those of Turkey, Iran and Russia, were due to hold talks hosted by Tehran on Monday on progress towards a peace agreement. However, Baku this month accused Yerevan of undermining the peace process with “aggressive rhetoric”. Armenia describes the Karabakh Armenians’ flight as ethnic cleansing driven by the threat of violence after a nine-month blockade of essential supplies, the latest chapter in a conflict between Christian Armenians and Turkic Muslim Azeris that goes back more than a century. Azerbaijan says the Karabakh Armenian civilians were welcome to stay and be integrated in Azerbaijani society, but left voluntarily.