“The Zangezur corridor is not only a land connection with Nakhichevan for Azerbaijan, but also a new integration line extending to the Turkic world from Turkey,” Turkish media quoted him as saying after his latest visit to Azerbaijan. “The opening of this corridor in a short time will also strengthen the transport and energy infrastructure of the Caucasus.”
“We expect our neighbor Iran to support these steps, which will serve the peace, stability, and development of our region,” added Erdogan.
Iran is strongly opposed to the extraterritorial corridor that would pass through Syunik, the only Armenian province bordering the Islamic Republic. Its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made this position clear to Erdogan when they met in Tehran in 2022. Khamenei also told Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian last July that the corridor would be “detrimental to Armenia” as well.
Pashinian’s government maintains that it can only agree to conventional transport links that would not exempt people and cargo transported to and from Nakhichevan from Armenian border checks. It says that Azerbaijan has ignored its unpublicized compromise proposals on the issue made in recent months.
Baku continues to list the “Zangezur corridor” among its conditions for ending the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev implicitly threatened in January to open it by force.
In April, the Armenian army and Iran’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), held a first-ever joint exercise along the Armenian-Iranian border. Visiting Armenia last week, Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh said Tehran “will not allow any encroachment on this border.” The Iranian ambassador in Yerevan, Mehdi Sobhani, afterwards told Armenian journalists to “forget about the Zangezur corridor.”