Clash in the Caucusus: Armenia-Azerbaijan tensions threaten to draw in Eurasia’s major powers
The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan now at full tilt is nasty, brutish, and drawn out. It has been running since 1988, peppered with ceasefires, massacres, ambushes and flare-ups.
It may sound eye-wateringly tangled – it is – but this is no geo-political sideshow. Deep in the Caucasus, the battle zone lies on doorstep of Europe and Asia, and has roots in both. It lies across major energy routes out of the port of Baku, fuel lifelines to Europe, Turkey, Russia and the South, not least Israel.
Already sponsors of the two sides – both moral and material – include Turkey and Israel, Iran, France and Russia.
Since last Sunday the conflict now unfolding on the border of these two countries has been the biggest clash of surveillance and combat drones in battle. It is a turning point in the story of war, with both sides using operational combat drones often in preference to manned strike aircraft.
It is also a spectacular flare-up in one of a score or more “frozen” border wars that litter Europe and Asia. The disease appears to be catching.
Today Armenia, with a population of around three million, is under full mobilization. Armenian troops, including volunteers from the family of Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, are reported to be fighting in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh, the focus of the fighting, and of the entire conflict.
The Armenian ministry of defence has reported that in the recent fighting Armenian forces have inflicted 1,750 casualties on their Azeri foes, downed 102 drones, 10 helicopters and destroyed 205 military vehicles. Much of this must be discounted to the usual bluster and bluff of military propaganda. But it does give a flavour of the scale of the fighting.
Armenia is heavily outgunned by Azerbaijan, which has a population of just under 10 million. But there are around 13 million Azeris in neighbouring Iran, and this is an important ingredient in the story. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have large diasporas in Europe and America.
The recent arming of Azerbaijan with the latest drones from Israel and Turkey seem to have been a major trigger to the war re-igniting now. Four flights of huge Ilyushin 76 transports have been spotted leaving the main Israeli Air Force Base in the Negev in the past fortnight – bound for Azerbaijan. The two countries are bound by a security and trade pact, no doubt replete with secret clauses, for oil and energy from Baku for Israel. Nominally Azerbaijan is a Muslim nation – but is generally regarded as the most secular Muslim community in the world.
The present conflict has its origins in the dying days of the Soviet Union. In 1988, Soviet Armenia decided to try to separate the enclave of Nagorno Karabakh from Soviet Azerbaijan. The fighting went on through the Soviet collapse, only achieving a cease fire organised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, in 1994. By that time 30,000 at least had been killed and at least one million Armenians and Azeris forced to flee as refugees – still a huge bone of contention for both sides.
In 1994 an Armenian-led republic of Artsakh was declared in Nagorno Karabakh, an enclave inside Azerbaijan, which in the south reaches the border with Iran. The entity still lacks international recognition. The stated war aim of Azerbaijan is to regain the enclave, or as much as possible, and seven related districts also under Armenian military control. The enclave itself is garrisoned by a substantial military force, largely drawn from Armenia itself.
“Pandora’s box is really wide open now,” Matthew Bryza, the American diplomat at the 1994 truce talks, told Al Jazeera this week. A better metaphor might be that the lid has blown off the Caucasus cauldron, which has been simmering for more than three decades.
The lines of conflict are ethnic, cultural, religious, commercial and even criminal. Armenia is one of the oldest Christian cultures and nations – and an old foe of Turkey. Once a tolerated minority, a millyet, along with the Greeks and the Jews in the Ottoman empire, Armenians were suppressed and driven out, with huge columns of starving villagers heading out of Anatolia, during the First World War. This is known as the Armenian Genocide, and up to a million may have perished as a result of it.
Turkey always denies this, though it is still in play in debates at the UN, the Council of Europe and the EU parliament.
The Turks, heirs of the Ottomans, back the Azeris, a Turkic people whom president Erdogan regards as one of the great family of Turks and Turkic peoples of about 250 million. His critics accuse him of neo-Ottomanism. Some go further and suggest he wants to be the new political leader of the Islamic world. However, the Arabs led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt say Erdogan is disqualified because of his overt and covert support of the Muslim Brotherhood, in which he is in cahoots with Qatar.
If the Turks are reviving the heritage of the Ottoman Empire, which ended at Versailles in 1919 and with the end of the caliphate in 1924, the Iranians still reflect aspects of the Persian empire in its many forms. So we have neo-Ottoman against neo-Persian heritage.
Some suspect the renewed urgency of the Erdogan government in Turkey on foreign battlefields as a sign of his weakness at home, particularly over the mishandling of Covid, and a steadily weakening economy.
The big technical change for Turkey is the success of its combat drones, especially the BayrakatTB2, which can fly and loiter over a battle area for 24 hours. Turkey has been using its drones to surprising effect in at least five theatres – against Kurdish militias in North East Syria and Iraq, around Idlib in North West Syria, in Lebanon and across the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa from Somalia. The drone attacks round Qandil on the Kurds of the YPG have caused casualties and thousands of refugees. Once again the Yazidi minority has been victim, with refugee villagers prevented from returning to their sacred homeland of Sinjar.
In Libya earlier this summer, Turkey’s use of mercenary forces, the TB2 drone and new man-portable anti-aircraft missiles led to the defeat of the forces of the warlord Khalifa Haftar as he attempted to take the capital Tripoli with his mercenary forces including fighters from the Russian Wagner corporation. Equipment, including drones form the UAE, was smashed and the forces round Tripoli forced to pull out – Russia airlifting hundreds of Wagner mercenaries. Russia became so alarmed that it sent a wing of MiG-29 fighter-bombers and Sukoy-24s to a deep desert base to stop Haftar’s force from collapsing entirely.
Israel has been supplying Azerbaijan with equipment, including Orbiter 1K and Orbiter3s, one of the most advanced tactical drones currently deployed anywhere. Orbiter 1Ks have been used this week, it seems. It is called the “kamikaze drone” because it can loiter for hours over the battle zone, and then slam into the target like a cruise missile, blowing up in the process.
Some Israeli commentators, such as Anshel Pfeffer of the liberal Haaretz, aren’t entirely happy with the marriage of convenience between Israel and Turkey in Azerbaijan – described in a recent Pfeffer report as “the kleptocracy on the Caspian, the source of much Israeli oil purchases and an extremely useful “backdoor” to its neighbour Iran for intelligence and other clandestine purposes.”
The Armenia-Azerbaijan fight is a bit of a free for all, with dozens of allies and proxies involved, supplying arms, advisers and propaganda. This includes France – which is trying through its membership of the so-called Minsk Group, with Russia and America, to get in on the diplomatic act. “I fear it is another attempt by Macron to curb Turkey, as he is intent in the Mediterranean,” one of the wisest diplomatic observers in the region, a serving ambassador, observed last night. “It’s very short sighted and a mistake, and bad for the EU’s foreign policy.”
Along with the dawn of the drone era, the battle over Nagorno Karabakh has global reference because of one three-letter word, gas. Oil and gas have been known in the area since the 19th century. Baku was major energy capital by the 1920s, when it became the centre of a major jazz scene. With the oil and gas millions comes classic Caucasus mafia culture and commerce. The country is run by the singularly autocratic approach of President Ilya Aliyev, and his clan.
No fewer than four major Caspian gas lines originate from Baku; through Grozny, and Novorossiysk (Black Sea) for Russia; Baku – Tbilisi – Supsa through Georgia; Baku – Tbilisi – to Ceyhan, Turkey’s port on the very eastern Mediterranean; across Anatolia into Turkey and the Adriatic line. They comprise two of the main gas routes into Russia and southern Europe.
“This is a European war, and it is one of many frozen wars that can blow up quite suddenly,” my friend the ambassador observed. He pointed to the Moldova and Transnistria dispute, which looks like an annex to the Ukrainian – Donbas conflict. The quarrel between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia, which turned into war in 2008, remains unresolved. “It’s the legacy of the lines on maps drawn by treaties and deals like Sykes-Picot in the Middle East, and Versailles,” he mused.
“That’s why the centre of gravity of this contest lies in Moscow – which has interests and alliances with both Armenia and Azerbaijan. But it could spin out of control.”
At the heart of the situation lies a dilemma depicted in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which launched the OSCE. These are: the inviolability of internationally agreed borders; that they shouldn’t be altered by force; and significant minorities should be allowed self-determination and autonomy, where possible.
So among the frozen, and near melting, border disputes you might number the Attila line dividing Cyprus, the Durand Line in Afghanistan, the Line of Control in Kashmir, the Line of Actual Control between China and India – to say nothing of Catalonia or the Falkland Islands.
Which one might also be at the mercy of the flick of a switch, turning off the diplomatic freezer, and turning that sinister, loitering, kamikaze drone?