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