“We believe that no war will break out in the region,” Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Ashtiani was quoted by Iranian news agencies as saying after a cabinet meeting in Tehran.
“We do not accept any change in the borders,” Ashtiani said, adding that the Iranian army’s General Staff also made this clear when it discussed increased tensions in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone during a recent meeting.
The Armenian government said last week that Azerbaijan has been massing troops along the Karabakh “line of contact” and the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in possible preparation for another large-scale military assault. Baku denied any military buildup there, saying that its troops are simply engaging in routine training.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian raised his concerns about the alleged buildup with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and other foreign leaders in a series of phone calls made over the weekend. Raisi was reported to reiterate that the Islamic Republic continues to support the territorial integrity of Armenia.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Nasser Kanaani, said on Monday that Baku has assured Tehran that it has no plans to attack Armenia. Azerbaijani officials have alleged this month growing Armenian “military provocations” in the conflict zone.
Armenian officials and pundits believe that a key goal of an Azerbaijan attack would be to open an exterritorial land corridor connecting Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through Syunik, the sole Armenian province bordering Iran. President Ilham Aliyev and other Azerbaijani leaders regularly demand such a corridor, citing the terms of a Russian-brokered agreement that stopped the 2020 war in Karabakh. Yerevan counters that the agreement calls for only conventional transport links for Nakhichevan.
Iran has repeatedly warned against attempts to strip it of the common border and transport links with Armenia. The Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei repeated these warnings when he met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Tehran last year.
Erdogan complained about Iran’s stance on the issue after visiting Baku in June. He claimed that unlike Tehran, Yerevan does not object to the idea of the “Zangezur corridor.”
Turkey’s Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu reportedly said on Wednesday that “in the coming months” Ankara will join in efforts to open the corridor. He did not elaborate.
“I believe that Azerbaijan, Turkey and Armenia will implement this project in a short period of time,” Uraloglu said, according to the Azerbaijani APA news agency.