Baku: Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev hosted talks on Monday with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan at which he hinted at the prospect of creating a land corridor between their two countries via Armenia, which opposes the idea.
Erdogan flew into Azerbaijan’s autonomous Nakhchivan exclave, a strip of territory nestled between Armenia, Iran and Turkiye that Ankara and Baku want to link up with rump Azerbaijan by carving out a land corridor that would run through southern Armenia.
Aliyev in 2021 threatened to create such a corridor — that would create a contiguous land bridge between Turkiye and Azerbaijan and deprive Armenia of a land border with Iran.
At a joint presser, Aliyev lamented that Soviet-era authorities had deemed part of what should have been territory belonging to the Azerbaijani Soviet republic as land belonging to the Armenian Soviet republic.
Published in Dawn, September 26th, 2023
