After Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev Tuesday harshly criticized Iran's decision to hold military drills close to the countries' shared border, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh revealed what was truly behind the unusual exercises being conducted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian army.
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"The drills carried out by our country in the northwest border areas... are a question of sovereignty," Khatibzadeh said in a statement on the ministry's website.
Tehran "will take all measures it judges necessary for its national security," he said, adding that "Iran will not tolerate the presence of the Zionist regime near our borders" – an allusion to Azerbaijan's friendly relations with Iran's enemy Israel.
Tensions between Baku and Tehran have flared in recent weeks after Azerbaijani police and customs officials began imposing a "road tax" on Iranian trucks shipping fuel and other goods to neighboring 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.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had criticized Tehran over the drills, calling them "a very surprising event."
"Every country can carry out any military drill on its own territory. It's their sovereign right. But why now, and why on our border?" he said in an interview with Turkish news agency Anadolu published on Monday.
Iran hadn't held military drills near the border since Azerbaijan became independent from the former Soviet Union almost 30 years ago, he said.
Aliyev said Iran ignored Azerbaijan's calls for many years to stop transporting goods to Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave that's internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory. No Iranian truck has entered Nagorno-Karabakh since Azerbaijan started imposing the tax, Aliyev said.
Iran's ambassador in 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, according to the Baku-based APA news service. Iranian officials have also told private companies to stop transporting goods to Nagorno-Karabakh, Musavi said.
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A senior cleric in Iran last week defended the IRGC's decision to hold military drills near the border with Azerbaijan as "a message to Israel not to make any mistakes," according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency, in a reference to Israel's ties to Azerbaijan.
Iran and Azerbaijan share a border of around 430 miles. Relations have soured as of late because of the reported use of Israeli arms during the recent Nagorno-Karabakh flare-up.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
