The recent hostilities between Azerbaijan and Armenia over their contested region of Nagorno-Karabkh has become an international event, with Turkey putting its weight behind Baku as Yerevan tacitly held to its understanding with Russia, which guarantees its security via the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO). However, the nature of geo-politics, specifically in the Middle East, has seemingly rubbed off in Central Asia as well with foreign fighters, allegedly ‘hired’ by Turkey via private contractors to work as ‘border guards’ arriving in Azerbaijan to add a significant backline for the Azeri military, like reported by eurasiareview.com.

Firstly, the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis is a very interesting study in modern movements of geo-politics itself, which is important to understand why some states would spend money to arm other states, without attempting to get directly involved via their sovereign militaries. In the Azeri – Armenian divide, the Azeris, who are more than 80% Shias, are being backed by Turkey, a Sunni-Islam state, while Iran is alleged also supporting Armenia, a majority Christian nation, while being the seat of Shia power. This ongoing theatre offers an interesting glimpse on the role of strategic and tactical aims vis-à-vis interests, the latter having much stronger resonance in foreign policy, specifically when viewed from a long-term perspective.

The protection of ‘interests’ that may be difficult to define around the ideations of a modern nation state often forces governments to resort to parallel, or ‘proxy’ warfare, not getting directly involved in military confrontation but fighting a geo-political tussle indirectly, at times on a third party’s soil. However, since 1964, when noted political scientist Karl Deutsch defined proxy warfare as ‘an international conflict between two foreign powers, fought out on the soil of a third country; disguised as a conflict over the internal issue of that country; and using some of that country’s manpower, resources as a means of achieving preponderantly foreign goals and foreign strategies,’ things have changed drastically. While the nature of conflict shifted in the post-WWII era, state-administered armed forces remained the prominent fighting outfits. This diluted further as geopolitics and warfare changed in the post-Soviet era of the 1990s, with rampant globalisation, technological advancements and so on adding newer layers and challenges. This was perhaps most publicly displayed by the multiple controversies in the mid-2000s around the security company Blackwater, run by American businessman and former US Navy SEAL Erik Prince, who privatised many parts of the US war in Iraq following 9/11, overtly showcasing perhaps for the first time the most crass form of market-acceptable profiteering from a conflict (Prince is still active, now trying to work with China).

Scholar Peter W. Singer adds to this thinking, highlighting three dynamics that led to the rise of a ‘private military industry’, the end of the Cold War, transformation of warfare blurring lines between soldiers and civilians and general trends towards privatization and outsourcing of government functions. Singer explains in his research how these changes rose within the American military establishments. However, a lot of these ideologies of warfare were also internalised by various other states in environments more fertile in conflict, such as the Middle East.

The Syrian civil war, raging as an endless spiral since late 2010, has seen the above-mentioned strategies playout in various formats. From the so-called Islamic State’s (ISIS) official rise in 2014, relying on incoming foreign fighters for technological and combat expertise and leadership, to Iran’s Fatemiyoun Brigade which comprises of young Afghan men who saw combat in places such as Aleppo, Hama, Deir Ezzor, Homs and so on in Syria against ISIS and other factions. This allowed Iran’s infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to keep Iranian casualties in the Syrian war low, while the country went through economic crisis due to sanctions and a probing population over the money being spent on wars beyond its borders. It does not all end only in Syria, in Libya, in northern Africa, Russia deployed mercenaries of the Wagner Group to support the renegade general Khalifa Haftar’s battle against the government in Tripoli. In response, once again, an overreaching Turkey is accused of sending fighters from Syria to help prop-up the Libyan government against Haftar, who is backed by Russia and the UAE.

Fighters from Syria are an amalgamation of circumstances and ground realities. Many who are finding their way into other conflict theatres such as Libya or now Azerbaijan don’t necessarily come from same backgrounds of militants, militias, Islamists and so on. While the ones fighting on Turkey’s behalf in Libya most likely are hardened militias who see Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s self-styled Sunni-power leader image as palatable, and do so in support of Ankara’s regional geopolitical manoeuvres, the ones in Azerbaijan, reportedly hired by private contractors, are those who suffer from economic destitution back home, and see this as merely a job that pays. The videos and images posted on social media of Syrian fighters killed in Nagorno-Karabakh have been traced back in some cases to men belonging to normal families without any history of being aligned with terror groups. However, the lure of a good pay day to fight for a second country on a third country’s land, perhaps has been far too inviting to ignore for many Syrians. In theory, this is the same model employed by the Fatemiyoun Brigade, with Afghan men taken to Iran, and then flown to Syria to fight for Tehran. This model has over the past few years become more visible, and viable for states such as Russia, Iran and Turkey.

For Turkey, emboldened by a leadership such as that of Erdogan who has managed to create problems on almost all sides of the Turkish borders with an expanding military reach ranging from Libya to the Mediterranean Sea, with friction with the likes of Greece, and by association the European Union, the US despite being a NATO ally and active military presence and geographic hold in northern Syria, ‘outsourcing’ conflicts becomes an economically viable option. During the internal GCC feud between Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, Erdogan deployed military assets to Doha, signal further entrenchment of Turkish military as part of its foreign policy. However, ultimately, all of this is bogged down by the limitations of a relatively timid Turkish economy, specifically during the Covid-19 era.

Another country where these kinds of ‘contract’ private entities could be deployed in the near future is Afghanistan, as the US hurries its withdrawal, leaving behind significant security vacuums. The private sector has not shied away from filling in such gaps in the past, and these private sector capabilities go much beyond just security guards on the borders. Iraq remains a prime example of the same, with companies that have nothing to do with the defence industry also seeing an opportunity to make a buck. For example, the American energy company Halliburton also won multiple contracts by the British and American military to transport troops to Afghanistan, amongst other operations in the mid-2000s despite defence not being its primary business in public discourse.

Unresolved crisis points such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and proxy conflicts enabled by the likes of Iran and the Gulf states are creating a micro-economy of fighters that are able and willing to fight in return for economic benefits. This largely comes from years of economic collapse of entire states, and not necessarily from Islamist terror groups and radicalisation. However, like private contractors, Islamist groups also employ similar tactics to retain a fighting force.

The international community should pay adequate attention to these trends of unchecked private militias for hire, that are deployed with much ease today to regional theatres, such as Nagorno-Karabkh today. The fact that Turkey was able to ‘hire’ and airlift third party fighters and only provide them air cover via a minimal deployment has a strong two-front tactical and strategic success at play, the first being purely military, and the second and perhaps more importantly being not inciting domestic politics against a leadership by starting conflicts in foreign lands and deploying own troops with the eventuality of casualties. Turkey’s overtures in Nagorno-Karabkh got support from the likes of Pakistan as well, where social media handles praised and supported Erdogan’s moves in favour of Baku. Islamabad’s own experiences and support for proxy warfare is well known world over.

International multilateral institutions should take these trends of outward-going foreign fighters from Syria as events that need urgent attention and develop international laws to check countries looking to exploit conditions of civil war even further for their strategic benefit. Like there are institutions against nuclear proliferation, chemical weapons and so on, such use of foreign citizens as war-time products should have an equitable global response both for safeguard of localised regional communities in conflict and the global security architecture at the same time.

Libya was the first Arab Spring revolution to be militarized and the only one to be met by humanitarian Western intervention. Nine years on, the country has turned into a proving ground for a new Great Game, one played between the old and recrudescent empires and abetted by middleweight Gulf states. It is a sign of things to come for the broader Middle East, like reported by newlinesmag.com.

For all the second thoughts and revisionist historicizing of the Arab Spring, the deficiencies we’ve come to associate with it were mainly brought on by counterrevolutionary forces, particularly those bankrolled by the United Arab Emirates, fearful of what democracy without its borders would mean for the political system within. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Libya, where in the absence of American ownership over its own led-from-behind intervention, Abu Dhabi crept in to patronize particular military and political groups in the hopes they could dominate the new Libya. However, Libyan politics proved to not be so straightforward: The UAE’s political proxies were largely outmaneuvered by other parties as well as rival alliances patronized by their Gulf opponent, Qatar.

The policy that indelibly changed Libya after the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi was the imposition by Egypt and the UAE of retired Gen. Khalifa Haftar and an accompanying propaganda campaign that blamed the country’s failed transition on Islamism and presented a rogue caudillo, once the hireling of the CIA, as its salvation. Haftar, who had disappeared after failing to take control of Libya’s revolutionary forces in 2011, re-emerged in Libya in 2014 as the country was mired in a political stalemate and increasingly fractious militia violence, calling for a military coup against the incumbent parliament if it didn’t step down. Haftar’s return was sponsored by Cairo and followed a similar path to the ascension of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in neighboring Egypt. Media channels aligned with Egypt and the UAE blamed a country’s political failures on democratically elected politicians, and a general with a tenebrous record was sanitized and portrayed as the only force capable of channeling popular discontent. Finally, a coup was mounted and branded as legitimate and stabilizing, couched in the Western-palatable grammar of “counterterrorism.”

Unlike Sisi, however, Haftar wasn’t the only one with guns. Given his proximity to Sisi and his Egyptian-style putsch, the full spectrum of Islamist militias inevitably rallied against him. They found useful allies among myriad local armed groups, which identified themselves as guardians of the stalled revolution and condemned Haftar and his foreign backers as counterrevolutionary interlopers. A civil war was unleashed, and Haftar’s ambitions of a national power grab were improvisationally localized. He hunkered down in a base in el-Rajma in eastern Libya in an area replete with political allies and those seeking to hitch themselves to his bandwagon, and over the coming years he would fight a long, destructive war for Benghazi, the capital of the region, and continue westward into the hydrocarbon-rich “oil crescent.” Cairo supplied Haftar with the strategic and organizational support he needed to transform his breakaway group of Salafist fighters and Gadhafi-era army officers into something resembling a military institution.

His successful half-coup gave way to a series of interlocking sideshow conflicts across Libya, all of which worsened throughout 2014 and climaxed the following year with the arrival of ISIS, which conquered the central Libyan city of Sirte. People-smuggling gangs launched hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants on barely-seaworthy vessels across the Mediterranean from western Libya. The depravity of Libya’s situation demanded action. Western states came together in a rare moment of alignment in 2015 to call for a negotiated settlement to the civil war, and a U.N.-mediated Government of National Accord (GNA) was born, something Washington and Brussels could feasibly partner with in the now all-consuming fight against ISIS and a spiraling migration crisis.

The Emiratis nominally supported the U.N. track and the birth of the GNA; in reality, they also developed an airbase at al-Khadim, near Haftar’s headquarters in the east. This base would become a crucial point of military support from Abu Dhabi and Cairo to Haftar’s various military campaigns in the coming years.

Moreover, Emirati-aligned groups in Libya boycotted the GNA almost as soon as it was inaugurated on Dec. 17, 2015. Libya’s partition endured and the United Nations returned to the mediation table. The UAE saw yet another opportunity, to nimbly operate within Libya’s congested diplomatic space and exploit and deepen European divisions over the Middle East. Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE’s crown prince, leveraged his burgeoning relationship with France, now mired in a national security crisis of repeated domestic ISIS attacks carried out largely by Francophone children of North African immigrants.

Where France had once been the keenest of NATO member-states to intervene in Libya against Gadhafi’s promised depredations, now it was driven almost exclusively by a counterterrorism program led by its defense and intelligence establishments. The UAE, reading this volte-face in priorities, created a strategic partnership with the Elysée encompassing territory from the Sahel to the Persian Gulf. Islamism, both agreed, was the underlying problem, whether it expressed itself in shredded corpses at the Bataclan or Muslim Brotherhood-led challenges to politics in Abu Dhabi. Under the outgoing Socialist presidency of Francois Hollande, France fully invested in Haftar’s “counterterrorism” program in 2016, going so far as to supply him with special forces, undermining the agreed-upon U.N. protocol of fostering the GNA, which at the time was fighting to liberate Sirte from ISIS.

Hollande’s successor, the young centrist Emmanuel Macron, has only furthered France’s strategic partnership with the UAE. A cocktail of American isolationism, Brexit, and sheer opportunism has convinced Macron that France should be primus inter pares of a new European foreign policy: ready to save Lebanon from itself, Russia from permanent pariah status, and Libya from its internationally recognized government. In a surprise conference in 2018 at La Celle-Saint-Cloud, Macron transformed Haftar from a quiet proxy to an avowed political ally, recasting Libya’s political process from an attempt to find cohesion among myriad competing groups to an oversimplified binary power-sharing arrangement between President Fayez Sarraj of the GNA and Haftar. Macron’s grand design reinvented Haftar from an upstart warlord among many to Libya’s heir apparent. It was an extraordinary moment.

Since the conference in LaCelle-Saint-Cloud, France and the UAE have not only armed and financed Haftar’s conquests but also shielded him from foreign criticism and marketed his takeover of Libya as a desired inevitability. By the time he scuppered the United Nations’ planned National Conference by attacking Libya’s capital in April 2019, he could claim support from the majority of the U.N. Security Council, a stunning demonstration of how successful Paris and Abu Dhabi were in disrupting the Western consensus to make space for their own policy.

France and the UAE also found themselves aligned with Moscow. Since Russia’s first currency delivery in 2015, which enabled eastern Libya to maintain breakaway status while Haftar waged his battles, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent policy has been to deepen the political fissures between the myriad players in the country and perpetuate Libya’s frozen conflict, as the surest way to vouchsafe its interests. Putin backs Haftar, yes, but not categorically and insofar as Haftar doesn’t grow too powerful to eschew Putin’s military assistance or diplomatic cover.

As is increasingly the case with all of Russia’s foreign adventures, the Libya file has been outsourced not to the Russian Defense Ministry directly but rather to its oligarchic contractor, Yevgeny Prigozhin, often referred to as “Putin’s chef,” owing to his catering empire in Russia. Having honed plausibly deniable dirty war in Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic and elsewhere, Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, a private military company, alongside political operatives tied to an unnamed “Company,” arrived in Libya in 2016 under contracts claiming they were repairing Soviet-era equipment and providing security for various industrial sites.

They did not, at first, do much fighting alongside Haftar’s forces, although the warlord claimed they did, going so far in one instance as to append phony paper Russian license plates to his army’s vehicles as a show of foreign force. According to internal Company documents obtained by the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative unit, Prigozhin’s operatives took a dim view of Haftar’s attempt to retake Tripoli, as they did of his prospective candidacy for president. They even imported Sudanese Janjaweed militias, the genocidaires of Darfur, to counter Haftar’s advance on Tripoli.

Nonetheless, his march on the Libyan capital was attended by hundreds of tons of Emirati armaments, which still proved insufficient to sway the battle in his favor. Haftar and the GNA forces reached a stalemate in 2019. Now Wagner was operationalized in earnest to correct for Haftar’s incompetence and, conveniently, position Russia above and beyond France or the UAE as the main external opponent to GNA rule.

Haftar may well have sacked Tripoli but for the intervention of a fourth country in the civil war: Turkey. Where its much-touted foreign policy doctrine prior to the Arab Spring was known as “zero problems with the neighbors,” now Ankara saw nothing but problems. These were either brought on by half-cocked or shortsighted Western interventions, which undercut Turkey’s longstanding national security interests (as in Syria) or created balkanized conflict zones and power vacuums, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was all too keen to exploit, particularly if it meant outmaneuvering his Gulf rivals (Saudi Arabia, the UAE) and his increasingly alienated allies in NATO.

With Haftar’s assault on Tripoli, Turkey felt the UAE was trying to create a fait accompli that would freeze Ankara out of the Maghreb and close off a valuable beachhead into sub-Saharan Africa. Gone, then, would be tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure and construction contracts that had been frozen since 2011; more important was the significant and perhaps unrecoverable strategic loss this would represent in Ankara’s regional battle with Abu Dhabi that used Haftar to outflank them in the Mediterranean.

But Turkey’s interests weren’t just defensive, and the GNA’s desperate situation gave Turkey the opportunity to make a fait accompli of its own. In exchange for the formal security partnership Turkey began with the GNA in December 2019, Ankara extorted an agreement on new maritime borders that underscored a bold Turkish play to prevent a group of adversarial states from exploiting eastern Mediterranean gas discoveries which would corner Turkey and eventually eclipse its regional status.

It was a campaign mainly reliant on drone technology, which turned Russian air defense systems into scrap metal and provided the best possible advertisement for Turkey’s defense sector. Undergirding this aerial assault were Turkish warships in the Mediterranean, which fired missiles at Haftar’s forces, and conventional soldiers on the ground in Libya embedded with thousands of Syrian mercenaries drawn from the ranks of the former Free Syrian Army.

Turkey’s superior technology and quick strategizing had Haftar on the backfoot. Not even Wagner and just over a dozen Russian aircraft – many flown from Hmeimim air base in northwest Syria – were sufficient to save the warlord; the best they could do was allow him to retreat back to his besieged city of Sirte.

The Kremlin was hardly distraught by Haftar’s defeat: Escalating would have increased its outlay against a NATO army on behalf of a general it never really believed in and who would now be even more reliant on Russian patronage than before. Haftar’s collapse allowed Prigozhin’s mercenaries to secure key tactical sites in his retreat, thereby making the Emiratis and those invested in routing the GNA and Turkey dependent on doing business with them.

As the GNA’s counteroffensive to sack Sirte was halted by Russian jets, Putin began negotiating directly with Erdogan. Macron, meanwhile, found a hobby horse: denouncing Turkey’s controversial drilling for natural gas in the North Cyprus economic exclusion zone, an intense episode of demarches and gunboat diplomacy now eclipsed by the outbreak of war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh. Again, Erdogan has deployed Syrian mercenaries into yet another once-frozen, now-alight conflict zone. But Macron’s approach only served to drive Turkey further from Western diplomacy on Libya and closer to Russia.

Meanwhile, the stalemate in Libya continues. The GNA is consolidating its position in the west as Turkey attempts to reform Libya’s militia-based security sector. The speaker of Libya’s House of Representatives, Aguileh Saleh, has been empowered as the new political face of the GNA’s antagonists following Haftar’s defeat. The political situation is extremely fragile across Libya, as popular frustration mounts against native elites who are looting the country while preventing any further political transition and against their foreign sponsors who enable them to do so. Libya’s oil infrastructure – the lifeblood of the country – remains Russia’s point of leverage in its ongoing competition for influence and hegemony with Turkey, thanks to the Wagner personnel who decamped from Tripoli’s frontlines to Libya’s oil fields and export terminals over the summer.

Absent from this scene are the Libyan people. After nine miserable years of revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war, they find themselves back on the streets, railing against yet another failed state. This time, however, there is no one intervention to save them; there are several meant to further atomize them.

The future Libya augurs for the region and beyond is bleak, a Frankensteinian patchwork of foreign tissues barely holding together the organic integrity of the state. If the Libyan prophecy is to be believed, then we have entered a new age of geopolitical brinkmanship, clumsily joined by expansionist authoritarians, unmanned aircraft, and roving soldiers of fortune.

Apart from the ancient and long-lasting historical, religious and lingual ties between Iran and the Caucasus, there are 800 kilometers of border lines that connect Iran to this region. The Iranian provinces of Ardabil and Eastern Azarbaijan have 369 kilometers and 200 kilometers of joint borders with the Republic of Azerbaijan respectively. Eastern Azarbaijan is the only Iranian province that shares borders with Armenia. This border line is 35 kilometers long. Iran is also the only country adjacent to the disputed region of Karabakh, like reported by valdaiclub.com.

None of Georgia, Russia and Turkey are in such close proximity to these disputes. The Iranian village of Khoda Afarin, located on the Eastern Azarbaijan-Armenia border, has been hit by the artilleries of the conflicting parties several times. The sound of the bullets, shells and missiles fired by the Armenian and Azerbaijani armed forces are heard in other Iranian villages close to the northwestern border. This puts Iran in a sensitive situation so that tension and war in Karabakh region and its surrounding areas directly impacts the security of Iran’s northwestern borders.

In addition to the security and border-related considerations, Iran is in a very different position compared with Georgia, Russia and Turkey. The presence of millions of Azeris in the northwestern provinces of Iran who are sensitive to the position of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the Karabakh issue as well as presence of a hundred thousand of Armenians in Iran who sympathize with Armenia has made the Karabakh dispute outstanding for Iran from an ethnical perspective. The other dimension is the religious considerations that the Shia seminaries particularly in the cities of Qom and Mashhad inside Iran and Najaf in Iraq have about supporting the Shia Muslims of the Republic of Azerbaijan and expect the Iranian government to support the Republic of Azerbaijan in the Karabakh dispute more actively. It is also noteworthy that there is a close tie between the two religious and ethnic considerations in many parts of Northwestern Iran with an Azeri majority population. In the meantime, some pan-Azeri and Pan-Turkish currents activate the religious and ethnical sentiments in these Azeri settling areas of Iran. In many occasions they disseminate false news about Iranian government’s position vis-à-vis the Karabakh dispute. However, when it comes to the position of Iran’s government on the Karabakh issue in the past three decades, eight principles can be referred to which can clear up many probable ambiguities:

1. Recognizing the government of Azerbaijan’s right to sovereignty over the Karabakh region and the seven regions around it

From the beginning of the Karabakh crisis in early 1990s, the Iranian government has recognized the region of Karabakh and regions around it as part of the Republic of Azerbaijan. This position has never changed during the previous three decades. Basically, Iran’s opposition to the ethnic dynamics and secessionism is one of the fundamental factors in Iran’s foreign policy in the South Caucasus. Iranian society is comprised of various ethnic groups and therefore, Iran opposes any ethnic-political dynamic that is separatist. In this framework, Iran never recognized the independence of Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in spite of good and close relations between Iran and Armenia and also Iran and the Russian Federation. In the past decades, this Iranian approach to ethnic dynamics and separatism has been persistent and is observed in Chechnya, Dagestan in North Caucasus and in Iraqi Kurdistan.

2. Non-recognition of the Republic of Artsakh and other political developments in the Karabakh region

In line with the abovementioned principle, Iran has not recognized any of the internal political developments in the region of Karabakh including the existence of Artsakh Republic and the results of the referendums and elections held in this region by the Armenians. Tehran has rejected all of them as invalid and believes that any political transformation in this region should be after the resolution of the dispute and conclusion of a peace treaty that is consented by all conflicting parties namely the government of Armenia, the Karabakh region and the government of Azerbaijan.

3. The balanced approach and maintenance of relations with both Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan

Iran has fifteen neighbors. This number is only comparable to such countries as China and Russia. Iran’s principal policy is maintenance of good relations with all its neighbors and therefore it has never initiated severing its relations with any of its neighbors. In this framework, from early 1990s Iran has asked for a balanced approach and maintenance of relations with both governments of Armenia and the Republic of Azarbaijan. Therefore, Iran’s position on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is different from that of Turkey, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan who have either cut their relations with Armenia or have not recognized it as an independent country. Fred Holliday calls this approach “bunch of flowers policy”. Svante Cornell describes it as the “disinterested player” and for Shirin Hunter it is “pragmatism”.

Regardless of what this policy is named, it has been in accordance to this policy that Iran has provided humanitarian and financial assistances to both Armenia and Azerbaijan from early 1990s. Contrary to some allegations by the pan-Azeri and pan-Turkish allegations, Iran provided the people of Azerbaijan, particularly, the residents of Nakhchivan with gas, electricity and basic goods from early 1990s and hosted thousands of Azerbaijanis displaced by war. Such actions of Iran are mentioned in the memoirs of Abulfaz Elchibey, Heydar Aliyev and also Hashemi Rafsanjani. Add to this the point that the balanced approach and the neighborhood policy of Iran in south Caucasus does not only apply to Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan but also includes Georgia. From this perspective, Iran enjoys a special and outstanding place in South Caucasus, as it is only Iran among the three neighbors of the region that has sustainable diplomatic relations with all three countries of the South Caucasus including Armenia and Georgia as the two Christian countries and Republic of Azerbaijan as the Muslim and Shia country. As a matter of fact, there are no political relations between Armenia and Turkey from 1993 to the present time. Russia and Georgia have also cut their relations since 2008. This grants Iran a unique place in South Caucasus.

4. Opposing the war and using force to resolve the Karabakh crisis

In line with the balanced approach and its neighborhood policy based on maintenance of relations with both governments of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan, which was explained under the previous heading, Iran is against any war and application of force to resolve the Karabakh crisis by the Armenian and Azeri parties. As was mentioned in the beginning of this piece, unlike Georgia, Russia and Turkey, Iran is adjacent to the disputed region of Karabakh and therefore any military encounter in this region can easily threaten the security of northwestern border areas of Iran in the two provinces of East Azerbaijan and Ardabil and instigate the ethnic and religious sentiments of millions of people inside Iran. Following such approach, Iran actively entered a process of mediation between Armenian and Azeri parties in 1990s and has supported any initiation for ceasefire and peace building that is agreed by both parties. For this reason, in the clashes of the past few years including the four days wars of April 2016 and July 2020 and also the recent clash starting from September 27, 2020 the Iranian high-ranking officials have immediately called for ceasefire between the two parties in the Karabakh dispute because continuation of the war and clashes close to Iran’s border is a serious threat to the national interests and security of Iran.

5. Maintaining the rights and security of the Armenians of Karabakh in the Karabakh peace plans

Iran’s approach to the Karabakh conflict is not a one-sided one. For Tehran, the rights and security of the Armenians of Karabakh is also important and should be respected. In any peace plan and in the case of any development including the return of Azeri war refugees from the Republic of Azerbaijan to the Karabakh region and the seven regions around it or any other political and legal development such as a referendum, the right to self-determination of the Armenians of Karabakh should be respected. From the Iranian perspective, overlooking this could lead to resumption of conflict between Armenians and Azeris which could in turn trigger a war or conflict in the region and ruin any peace plan in the Karabakh region.

6. Opposing the interference of trans-regional powers in resolution of the Karabakh crisis

In line with its foreign and defense policy, Iran is opposed to any interference of trans-regional powers such as United States and NATO in the resolution of the Karabakh crisis. Similar to other crises in the region including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria, Iran believes that the Karabakh crisis should also be resolved with the political will of the two countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The neighboring countries like Georgia, Russia, Turley and Iran can join this process in various forms if Yerevan and Baku ask for it.

7. Opposing the stationing of international peacekeeping forces in the Karabakh contact lines along the Iranian border

In line with the principle of opposing the interference of the trans-regional powers in the resolution of the Karabakh crisis, Iran is also opposed to stationing of international peace keeping forces particularly if they include trans-regional forces in the contact lines of Karabakh close to Iran’s border. Instead, Iran supports indigenous and regional mechanisms for maintenance of ceasefire and peace in Karabakh as well as provision of security to its residents both Armenian and Azeri.

8. Mediating the process of peace and dispute resolution upon the request from the governments of Azerbaijan and Armenia

In early 1990s the Iranian government actively embarked on mediation between Azerbaijan and Armenia upon their request. This resulted in a peace agreement between Yagub Mammadov (the acting president of Azerbaijan and Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the then president of Armenia mediated by Iranian president of the time Hashemi Rafsanjani in May 1992. Unfortunately, due to some conditions including the occupation of the city of Shusha by Armenians in May 8, 1992 (only one day after conclusion of the Tehran agreement) this mediation failed. Here, Iran could not repeat the successful experience of mediating in the Tajikistan civil war which culminated in the signing of the peace agreement between the government of Tajikistan and the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT) in 1997. In this case, the Russian Federation was also involved. Despite this unsuccessful experience and despite excluding Iran from the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the government of Iran has supported any mediation and initiation for ceasefire and peace between Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan on the issue of Karabakh and has always insisted that Iran’s involvement in such initiatives is contingent upon the willingness and request of the leaders of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan.

In light of the eight mentioned principles, Iran has anxiously followed up the clashes between Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan, started from September 27, 2020 which unlike the two previous four days wars of April 2016 and July 2020 are serious breach of the ceasefire from 1994 to date. The recent clashes in Karabakh have been outstanding in terms of the expansion and volume of the conflict, human and financial losses, the level of preparedness, the curfew and the general mobilization inside Armenia and Azerbaijan and also the all-out political and military support of the Turkish government and army from the Republic of Azerbaijan. These have added to Iran’s concerns about the conditions of the region. Iran’s demand in the current situation is a quick ceasefire by the two parties to prevent more human and financial losses and to curb the intensification of the conflict into an all-out war in the Caucasus that would make the conditions uncontrollable with all the three countries in the Caucasus (Armenia, the Republic of Azerbaijan and Georgia) and the three neighboring countries of Iran, Russia and Turkey the losers.