Heads of Turkey and Azerbaijan meet in territory captured during Nagorno-Karabakh war

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has travelled to Azerbaijan for a one-day trip to meet his counterpart Ilham Aliyev.

The visit was during an inauguration ceremony of a new airport in Zangilan, the second airport built on territory captured by Baku from Armenian control two years ago.

In 2020, six weeks of fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces killed over 6,700 people. Russia deployed around 2,000 peacekeepers to Nagorno-Karabakh under a peace deal that ended that conflict. 

Turkey was a key military ally to Baku during the war, which displaced around 90,000 people, who fled the fighting into Armenia. An estimated 88% of them were women or children, according to the United Nations.

Last month, fears of another bloody conflict were sparked when more than 200 soldiers from both sides died in fighting along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.

After the fighting, a video posted on social media showed Baku’s forces allegedly killing at least seven Armenian prisoners of war, according to Human Rights Watch. In a report on the incident, the organisation described the killings of prisoners of war as a war crime.

Baku says it has started an investigation into the video.

Not far from the inauguration, the Iranian Army is carrying out military exercises along its border with Azerbaijan.

Iran has a 44-kilometre-long border with Armenia that Tehran wants to preserve.