By Andrew Osborn
(Portal) – Early on September 19, Azerbaijan’s president launched a lightning-fast military plan months in the making that would redraw the geopolitical map and avenge the ignominious defeat suffered by his father some 30 years earlier.
President Ilham Aliyev, in power for two decades and already behind a successful war, had often spoken of bringing the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave back under Azerbaijan’s full control after the Armenian population settled in the early 1990s had renounced Baku’s rule.
Now a confluence of factors has convinced Aliyev, 61, that the time is right, Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Britain, told Portal.
“The story alternates and zigzags,” Suleymanov said. “We couldn’t do it sooner and it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to do it later.”
“The stars aligned for certain reasons, and President Aliyev saw the alignment,” said Suleymanov, who previously worked in Aliyev’s office.
Prominent among these “stars” was the new inability or unwillingness of Russia, the West or Armenia to intervene to protect Nagorno-Karabakh. According to Azerbaijan, the self-governing enclave had 10,000 fighters, whose own army – estimated by Western experts at over 120,000 men – dwarfed them.
Speaking to Portal, two senior officials and a source who worked with Aliyev stressed that the decision to retake the breakaway region took shape over months as diplomatic realities changed.
It was also deeply personal for the president, they said.
The day after his troops entered, Aliyev spoke to the people of Azerbaijan and said he had ordered his soldiers not to harm civilians. Baku later said that 192 of its soldiers were killed in the ensuing operation; the Karabakh Armenians that they had lost over 200 people.
“President Aliyev is completing something his father could not do because he ran out of time,” said one of the sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to comment to the media.
Aliyev’s actions have loosened Russia’s decades-long grip on the strategically important South Caucasus region, crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines, lying between the Black and Caspian Seas and bordering Iran, Turkey and Russia.
In three interviews, one before and two after the military operation, Aliyev’s foreign policy adviser Hikmet Hajiyev said Baku’s patience with the status quo was exhausted.
Less than two weeks before Azerbaijani forces entered Karabakh, Hajiyev told Portal that Baku was not seeking military targets “at this point” but remained vigilant. It could not accept what he called a “grey area” with Karabakh’s own armed security forces, which he compared to the mafia on Azerbaijani territory, he said.
The Karabakh Defense Force has since disbanded under a new ceasefire agreement, but it has in the past rejected criticism from Azerbaijan and described itself as a legitimate fighting force.
On the day of the military operation, after fighting had subsided, Hajiyev listed what he called “triggering elements” that prompted Baku to take military action, and mentioned a landmine explosion earlier that day in a part of Karabakh, which was recaptured in 2020, two Azerbaijani civilians were killed in the war.
“Enough is enough,” Hajiyev said.
Aliyev also referred to the mine attack and a similar incident in which four other people were killed. Karabakh Armenians called the claims an “absolute lie.” Portal could not independently verify the incident.
In this case, Russia, which has peacekeepers on the ground but is preoccupied with its own war in Ukraine, took the side.
Hajiyev said Azerbaijan informed the Russians about this “within minutes” before the operation began.
Nikol Pashinyan, prime minister of neighboring Armenia, which has twice fought major wars over Karabakh, ignored calls from opposition politicians to intervene and said his country must be “conflict-free” for the sake of its own independence.
The West, which had previously attempted to mediate, merely urged Aliyev to halt his operation and was duly ignored.
Pashinyan continued to sharply criticize Russia for not doing enough to avert the crisis. In a conference call last week, the Kremlin denied that its peacekeepers should have intervened.
The Russian Foreign Ministry added that he was making “a huge mistake” and accused him of trying to destroy Armenia’s centuries-old ties with Moscow.
WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
The trouble had been brewing for months.
With Russia distracted in Ukraine, Aliyev seemed to sense an opportunity.
In December last year, Azerbaijani citizens who described themselves as environmentalists unhappy about illegal mining began blocking the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Karabakh with Armenia.
Karabakh officials said at the time that the protesters were a front that included Azerbaijani officials. Baku denied the accusation.
Armed Russian peacekeepers appeared unwilling to risk escalation and took no action to forcibly disperse the demonstrators.
In June, Azerbaijan blocked the corridor and stopped transport, including the passage of humanitarian aid, citing a shooting. It allowed only medical evacuees to leave, a move that worsened food and medicine shortages in Karabakh.
Armed border guards occupied a checkpoint near a base of Russian peacekeepers, who again failed to intervene. Baku ignored calls from Washington and Moscow to open the road, citing the danger of arms smuggling.
To advance peace negotiations, Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan made what appeared to be a groundbreaking offer in May: Armenia was willing to recognize Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan if Baku guaranteed the security of its ethnic Armenian population.
Aliyev seems to have taken what he saw as a long-overdue admission of reality as a sign of weakness. The source who worked with Aliyev called the change “very important.”
“After Armenia recognized Karabakh as an integral part of Azerbaijan, what status can the criminal regime that has been in charge in Karabakh for 30 years have?” Aliyev told Azerbaijanis in his victory speech last week.
On the same day, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Pashinyan of laying the foundation for the demise of Karabakh as an ethnic Armenian enclave by recognizing him as part of Azerbaijan. That “changed the situation” for Russia’s own peacekeepers, it said.
UNFINISHED TASK
Karabakh slipped from Azerbaijan’s control in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a war from 1988 to 1994, around 30,000 people were killed and over 1 million displaced, over half of them Azerbaijanis.
Aliyev’s father, then-President Heydar Aliyev, had to agree to a ceasefire that cemented Armenia’s victory.
Ilham, who succeeded Heydar after his death in 2003, signed an oil deal a year later with a BP-led consortium that gave Azerbaijan funds to begin building a modern army.
More recently, Azerbaijan benefited financially from the West’s decision to cut energy purchases from Russia. The European Commission agreed last year to double imports of Azerbaijani natural gas by 2027.
For years, Moscow’s alliance and defense pact with Armenia – where it has military facilities – kept Baku from using force, even as Russia sold weapons to both sides.
But Moscow’s relations with Armenia began to deteriorate in 2018 when Pashinyan, a former journalist, led street protests that brought him to power at the expense of a long line of pro-Russian Armenian leaders.
And as the Azerbaijani army’s reform and modernization efforts increased, Armenia limped from crisis to crisis.
Seeing that there was no love lost between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pashinyan, who had advocated for relations with the West, Aliyev tested the situation. In 2020, he began a 44-day war that his army won – with the help of advanced Turkish drones, recapturing part of Karabakh.
Russia brokered a ceasefire that appeared to be a victory for Moscow, allowing it to send nearly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to Karabakh. The move gave him a military footprint in Azerbaijan, an apparent buffer against further Azerbaijani military actions.
Then Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed the equation again, drawing Moscow into a war of attrition with Kiev.
FOG IN THE AIR
On Tuesday morning, September 19, residents of Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh and known as Khankendi of Azerbaijan, heard loud and repeated artillery fire as fog hung in the air.
What Aliyev described as an anti-terror operation had begun. Ground troops, supported by drones and artillery, advanced to overwhelm Karabakh’s defense lines.
At least five Russians died in the violence that followed, in an apparent accident for which Aliyev apologized to Putin.
Within 24 hours, Baku declared victory and the Armenian Karabakh fighters agreed to a ceasefire that required them to disarm.
Karabakh’s Armenians said they felt betrayed from all sides.
“Karabakh has been left alone: Russian peacekeepers are practically not fulfilling their obligations, the democratic West has turned its back on us, and Armenia has also turned its back,” David Babayan, an adviser to the leader of the Karabakh government, complained to Portal one day according to the route.
Babayan has now turned himself in to the Azerbaijani authorities, he announced on Telegram. The government he advises has announced its own dissolution.
“Azerbaijan regained its sovereignty at around 1 p.m. yesterday,” Aliyev told the nation.
Four days after the operation, some of Karabakh’s 120,000 Armenians began a mass exodus to Armenia by car, fearing persecution and ethnic cleansing despite Azerbaijan’s security promises. Ten days after the attack in Azerbaijan, 98,000 people fled to Armenia, authorities there said.
The return of Karabakh paves the way for the return of hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis who once fled Karabakh, a promise made repeatedly by Aliyev’s father.
“President Aliyev handed over his father’s will,” said Suleymanov, the ambassador to Britain.
(Reporting by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)