Turkey insists on re-igniting war Karabakh by sending soldiers to Azerbaijan

Fatima Abdul Ghani

Turkey is looking for a foothold in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. This is how Ankara’s recent moves appear, as it tries to play a role in the armistice phase between Armenia and Azerbaijan, just as it played during the war between the two countries.

This comes in the context of a memorandum sent by the Turkish presidency to the parliament to approve sending Turkish soldiers to Azerbaijan after the two warring countries signed a ceasefire agreement sponsored by Russia.

Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani ambassador to Moscow stated that Turkey’s presence in the South Caucasus region should not frighten anyone, apparently indicating that Azerbaijan has agreed to the Turkish moves.

“Turkey is a sister country and a strategic ally of Azerbaijan. Today a new geopolitical situation appears in the South Caucasus. Turkey is participating on the ground in this process,” Ambassador Polad Bülbüloğlu said during a press conference held by the international news agency Rossiya Segodnya.

“Look how the situation is developing. Iran supports the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan… in the South Caucasus – Russia, Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan. This is the formation that exists today. Therefore, the presence of Turkey should not frighten anyone,” Bülbüloğlu added.

In turn, the Russian presidency announced that Turkey’s plans to send troops to Azerbaijan comes according to the agreement between Moscow and Ankara regarding the establishment of a joint monitoring center on the armistice in the Karabakh region.

But earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denied any intention of the presence of Turkish peacekeepers in the region. He made it clear at the time that the future tasks of Ankara would be limited to technical observation only, noting that the peacekeeping operation in the region is carried out exclusively by Russian forces.

However, the relentless Turkish pursuit of a permanent presence in the South Caucasus region does not stop there, as Ankara exploits the interlocking demographic to be the gateway to infiltration into this strategic region.

In this context, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights revealed the Turkish government’s intention to keep a number of mercenaries loyal to it in the Nagorno-Karabakh region who were sent to support Azerbaijan in the battles against Armenia.

The Syrian Observatory said in a report, “The Turkish government will keep batches of Syrian fighters in the Karabakh region, despite the end of the military operations and an agreement reached between Azerbaijan and Armenia with Russian mediation. But Turkey invokes that these fighters have their roots from that region; that is, from the Caucasus and other areas,” adding that the Turkmen fighters are loyal to Ankara.

In a related development, the Syrian Observatory monitored the arrival of a new batch of mercenary corpses to Syria who were killed earlier during the military operations in the Karabakh region, including about 30 fighters who died there.

According to the observatory’s statistics, the death toll of mercenaries since they were thrown into the battles by the Turkish government at the end of September reached 293 people, including 225 whose bodies were returned to Syria, while the bodies of the rest are still in Azerbaijan.

It is noteworthy that the number of Syrian fighters who were transferred to Azerbaijan reached 2,580 mercenaries, while 342 of them returned after they had given up everything, including their material dues.