Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said he is “very surprised” by Iran’s decision to hold military drills close to their border amid tension between the two neighbours over a key transport route.
“Why now and why near our borders?” Mr Aliyev said in an interview published on Monday with Turkey’s state-owned Anadolu news service. Iran had not held military drills near the border since Azerbaijan became independent from the former Soviet Union almost 30 years ago, he said.
Tension between Baku and Tehran flared in recent weeks after Azerbaijani police and customs officials began imposing a “road tax” on Iranian lorries shipping fuel and other goods to neighbouring Armenia.
A section of the main route to Armenia passes through Azerbaijan on land Armenian forces occupied for decades until last year’s 44-day war between them over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Mr Aliyev said Iran had ignored Azerbaijan’s calls for many years to stop transporting goods to Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave that is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory.
No Iranian lorry has entered Nagorno-Karabakh since Azerbaijan started imposing the tax, Mr Aliyev said.
Iran’s ambassador to Baku, Seyyed Abbas Musavi, said the exercises “can’t be seen as a threat to our friends”, and that Azerbaijan had been told about them months earlier, the Baku-based APA news service reported.
Iranian officials have also told private companies to stop transporting goods to Nagorno-Karabakh, he said.
A senior cleric in Iran last week defended a decision by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to conduct military drills near the border with Azerbaijan as “a message to Israel not to make any mistakes”, a reference to Israel’s ties to Azerbaijan, semi-official Fars news agency reported.
Iran has been suspicious of Azerbaijan’s links to Israel, a key supplier of drones and other weapons that helped Baku tip the military balance in its favour in last year’s war with Armenia.
Pieces of Her
Stars: Toni Collette, Bella Heathcote, David Wenham, Omari Hardwick
Director: Minkie Spiro
Rating:2/5
The five pillars of Islam
House-hunting
Top 10 locations for inquiries from US house hunters, according to Rightmove
- Edinburgh, Scotland
- Westminster, London
- Camden, London
- Glasgow, Scotland
- Islington, London
- Kensington and Chelsea, London
- Highlands, Scotland
- Argyll and Bute, Scotland
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- Tower Hamlets, London
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League semi-final, first leg
Barcelona v Liverpool, Wednesday, 11pm (UAE).
Second leg
Liverpool v Barcelona, Tuesday, May 7, 11pm
Games on BeIN Sports
Know your cyber adversaries
Cryptojacking: Compromises a device or network to mine cryptocurrencies without an organisation's knowledge.
Distributed denial-of-service: Floods systems, servers or networks with information, effectively blocking them.
Man-in-the-middle attack: Intercepts two-way communication to obtain information, spy on participants or alter the outcome.
Malware: Installs itself in a network when a user clicks on a compromised link or email attachment.
Phishing: Aims to secure personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.
Ransomware: Encrypts user data, denying access and demands a payment to decrypt it.
Spyware: Collects information without the user's knowledge, which is then passed on to bad actors.
Trojans: Create a backdoor into systems, which becomes a point of entry for an attack.
Viruses: Infect applications in a system and replicate themselves as they go, just like their biological counterparts.
Worms: Send copies of themselves to other users or contacts. They don't attack the system, but they overload it.
Zero-day exploit: Exploits a vulnerability in software before a fix is found.
