Azerbaijani President Comments on Plans to Occupy Zangezur Corridor and Close Iran-Armenia Border

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev commented in an interview with Al Arabiya regarding reports published by some media outlets claiming that Azerbaijan plans to occupy Zangezur. “There have been numerous reports circulating in some media and websites about the alleged occupation of Zangezur by Azerbaijan. That Azerbaijan allegedly plans to close the Iran-Armenia border. This is absolutely false. We had no such intention. Again, if we wanted to do this, we would have done it in November 2020. And it would have been very easy. Even in the last five years, it wouldn't have been difficult to do this. After all, the route is only forty kilometers. From a military standpoint, it wouldn't take much time. You just go from both sides—from Nakhchivan and the main territory of Azerbaijan—and take it. Everyone knows this. And even those who give bad advice know that we have such power. We didn’t do it because we are not the aggressor. We are not an occupying country. We are a people and a country that liberates, which is what we did. And our war was just, a liberating war, a war on our land, a war to restore justice. Therefore, from this perspective, I believe that all these rumors about our plans to close the Armenia-Iran border are absolutely unfounded. Everyone knows this.

By the way, in these five years, when Armenia blocked the opening of the Zangezur corridor, we reached an agreement with the Iranian government again, at the intergovernmental level, about the construction of a bypass road through Iranian territory, which was named the Araz corridor, after the Araz River,” said Ilham Aliyev.