Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev on Sunday evening and officially denied Tehran’s involvement in the drone strikes on the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan on March 5 — which Baku blamed on Iran shortly after the incident.
The phone call added a further layer of complexity on an already tense situation between the two countries, as rumors continue to swirl that Azerbaijan may be pulled into the war.
Previously, on Saturday, Azerbaijan’s security service (DTX) said it had foiled a terrorist plot organized by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) against the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline and several Jewish sites in Azerbaijan. While the DTX released a video detailing the investigation on 6 March, accompanying information shared by the state-run media outlet Azertac said that several of the suspects had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison, meaning the actual plot had been organized earlier, likely long before the drone strikes.
The terrorist plot was not mentioned in the readout of the phone call between Aliyev and Pezeshkian.
Instead, it said that Pezeshkian “expressed his gratitude to President Ilham Aliyev for his visit to the Iranian Embassy in Azerbaijan to offer condolences over the passing of the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Khamenei], and numerous civilians, as well as for his intention to provide humanitarian aid to Iran.”
