IS AZERBAIJAN BECOMING AREA OF CONFRONTATION BETWEEN IRAN AND ISRAEL?

In January, Azerbaijani authorities made a series of announcements stating they had revealed a plot by three Azerbaijani citizens to assassinate leading members of Azerbaijan’s Jewish community and a prominent Israeli official. Of even higher significance were Baku’s allegations of Hezbollah and Iran being the masterminds of the prepared assassinations. The circumstances around the event signify Azerbaijan’s increasingly difficult relationship with Iran and highlight both the country’s vulnerability to Iranian leverage and its strategic significance as a conduit for intelligence and potential military operations against Iran.

BACKGROUND: According to Azerbaijan’s Ministry of National Security, Rasim Aliyev and Ali Huseynov were captured along with automatic weapons and explosives smuggled from Iran. They were preparing attacks on the Israeli ambassador in Baku, Michael Lotem, and Rabbis Shneor Segal and Mati Lewis, both working in Baku’s largest synagogue and an affiliated Jewish religious school. The third conspirator and likely leader of the plot is identified as Balagardash Dadashov and has allegedly been based in the Iranian city of Ardebil across the Araxes River, hence out of reach of Azerbaijani authorities. The three men are believed to be members of an Azerbaijani cell of Hezbollah, a militant Shiite organization and Iran’s “terror proxy” in the Middle East.  According to the Ministry of National Security, Aliyev, Huseynov, and Dadashov were supplied with all necessary equipment to carry out the operation and US$ 150,000 by Iranian intelligence officers. According to some sources, the conspirators were also instructed by Iranians to assassinate Gaby Ashkenazi, chief of the Israeli defense forces, who was expected to visit the Azerbaijani capital in a few months.     

The Azerbaijani government has long sought to profile itself as a leading partner of Israel in the post-Soviet space in general and the South Caucasus in particular. Baku incessantly emphasizes the fact that there have never been cases of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism in Azerbaijan and that the country’s Jews have always been a thriving community that has enjoyed trouble-free relations with the Azerbaijani majority. Accordingly, local elites have traditionally stressed the highly secular character of the Azerbaijani regime and society and its general lack of religious fundamentalism, in contrast to its direct neighbors to the north and south, in an attempt to display Azerbaijan as a pro-Western, pro-American and to a certain extent also pro-Israeli democracy, although with some local peculiarities when it comes to the practical implications of that democracy. This is attested by the fact that notwithstanding the recent – and significant – deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations, Baku has made its best effort to maintain a cordial relationship with Israel, improving cooperation with the Jewish state in a wide range of areas. This is perhaps the reason why the former chief of Israel’s ministry of defense and current Knesset member Binyamin Ben Eliezer has claimed that “Azerbaijan-Israel relations are so reliable that they will not be affected by the tensions with Turkey.”

IMPLICATIONS: Israel has recently intensified its activities in the South Caucasus, a development that is conditioned by a number of factors. First, the region is host to a relatively large Jewish community which counts around 45,000 in Georgia and up to 40,000 in Azerbaijan, where the number of citizens adhering to the Jewish religion has tripled over the last fifteen years. Second, the region has still not entirely realized its potential as an exporter of oil and natural gas, as well as a transit hub that would link the Caspian with global markets. Today, around one-sixth of Israel's oil inflow comes from Azerbaijan. Last but not least, Israel’s interest in the region has increased in the context of the fiercely debated possibility of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the necessity to safeguard overland access to the Islamic Republic. With the considerable deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations in recent years, Armenia’s pro-Iranian stance, Turkmenistan’s neutrality, and the ongoing turmoil in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Azerbaijan has attracted Israeli interest. While Baku’s hypothetical consent to any country that would launch an attack on Iran is under current circumstances highly unrealistic given Azerbaijan’s vulnerability to an Iranian counterattack, this probability cannot be ruled out completely. Most importantly, Azerbaijan’s geographical location and its interconnection with Iran’s 20 million-strong Azerbaijani minority might become instrumental for Israeli intelligence and secret services.      

Following the Azerbaijani authorities’ allegations, a number of observers both within and outside the country have interpreted them as another effort by the Aliyev government to strengthen its ties with Israel, securing support from both the Jewish state and the Jewish Diaspora, and gaining sympathies from the U.S. and key Western nations for the secular Azerbaijani state that has been at the forefront of the civilized world’s struggle against religious fanaticism, a popular ethos that has been widely used by official Baku for at least a decade.

Even though this viewpoint cannot be completely ruled out, some facts indicate Tehran’s involvement. Similar attempts have recently been foiled in Thailand and Bulgaria, with a range of similarities in the way the plots were organized. In all cases Israeli authorities have voiced considerable concern over the planned attacks, causing some observers to speculate that Mossad officers might have been involved in foiling the planned assassinations in Baku. Indeed, this was not the first attempt to assassinate Jewish – or Israeli – persons in Azerbaijan as a similar case was foiled in 2008. After being convicted to long sentences in Azerbaijan, the conspirators Ali Karaki and Ali Najmeddin, both Lebanese Shiites affiliated with Hezbollah, and an Iranian citizen were unexpectedly released and deported to Iran in August 2010, following sustained pressure from Tehran. 

It has recently become obvious that Iranian secret services are intensifying their efforts to use the Shiite factor to destabilize Azerbaijan from within. An overwhelming part of Azerbaijanis share the Shiite faith and religion has become increasingly appealing to a certain segment of the Azerbaijani population as a protest ideology to what they consider the degradation of traditional values and omnipotent corruption. The lack of a strong and widely supported (secular) opposition party has also played a role in this shift. In addition to ordinary believers, Tehran has reinforced its efforts to win the minds of the Azerbaijani Shiite clergy particularly in the peripheral areas, championing the rights of the “pro-headscarf party” in the recent clashes following the criminalization of head scarves in Azerbaijani educational institutions. Accordingly, the language used by Iran-based Azerbaijani-language TV and broadcast services aired to Azerbaijan has become more aggressive, contributing to increased tensions between Azerbaijan’s pro-secular and increasingly vocal and violent pro-religious camps. Indicative of this was the murder in November of the “Azerbaijani Salman Rushdie,” Rafik Taghi, a well-known physician and publicist known for his influential articles aimed against Islamic radicalism, as well as the Islamic regime in Iran. A fatwa sanctioning Taghi’s murder was issued in 2006 by the Iranian ayatollah Mohammad Fazel Lankarani, which was de facto approved of by Iranian authorities.

CONCLUSIONS: Whoever masterminded the recent events, they boosted Baku’s role as a secular Muslim bastion of pro-Western forces in the turbulent region and further strengthened the crucial Azerbaijan-Israeli axis. Lacking strong allies and in a situation of latent conflict with at least two of its immediate neighbors, this is a rather favorable development for Azerbaijan, which cannot afford a one-off stand against Iran. For Iran, the world was reminded of an anti-Jewish – and prospectively also anti-Western – Islamist network operating in Azerbaijan that is capable of carrying out attacks on Iran’s enemies. In the current situation marked by the newly imposed sanctions on oil exports from Iran by the U.S. and key EU states, reducing Azerbaijan’s potential as a stable energy supplier and highlighting the existence of militant Islamist groups could help minimize prospective plans to base a possible attack on Iran on Azerbaijani soil. Azerbaijan’s importance to Israel also increases, as it is seen as a friendly country with a deeply contested relationship with its southern neighbor – a fact that has increased in significance following the recent deterioration of Jerusalem’s relationship with Ankara and consequent inability to use Turkish soil for the activities of Israeli intelligence. Following the intensification of the Israeli-Iranian rivalry, Azerbaijan’s key geographical location and the existence of a strong Azerbaijani minority with increasingly active pro-separatist and anti-Iranian sentiments is regarded with increasing interest in Israel and might turn the South Caucasian country into an area of Israeli-Iranian confrontation.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr. Emil Souleimanov is assistant professor at the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of “An Endless War: The Russian-Chechen Conflict in Perspective” (Peter Lang, 2007).