Turan Research Center

On Thursday morning, Iranian drones struck the passenger terminal of Nakhchivan International Airport and landed near a school in the village of Shakarabad, injuring four civilians in Azerbaijan's western exclave. President Ilham Aliyev called it "an act of terror against the territory of Azerbaijan" and placed his armed forcesat full combat readiness. Tehran denied involvement — however, Azerbaijan's Ministry of Defense stated that its technical monitoring systems confirmed four unmanned aerial vehicles from Iran's armed forces were directed toward the Nakhchivan region, with one neutralized by Azerbaijani forces and others targeting civilian infrastructure.

Shortly after the strikes, IRGC-linked Telegram channels went further than Tehran's official denials. The channel Sepah Pasdaran, which tracks and amplifies IRGC operations, published a post taking credit for the Nakhchivan attack and framing it as a warning shot — a signal that worse would follow if Azerbaijan continued its strategic alignment with Israel and the United States.

Separately, reports of strikes near Shamkir, a village close to the Georgian border through which the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline runs, raised the specter of an even graver escalation: a direct Iranian attack on the energy infrastructure that delivers Caspian oil to Europe and Israel, bypassing both Russia and Iran.

These are not stray rounds from a chaotic battlefield. They are the logical culmination of months of escalating Iranian threats against Azerbaijan — and the clearest evidence yet that Tehran's decision-making apparatus has crossed from strategic calculation into self-destructive overreach.

A Pattern, Not an Accident

Since the US-Israeli joint strikes on Iran began on February 28, Tehran has lashed out at an extraordinary range of targets. Iranian missiles and drones have hit Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and British sovereign territory in Cyprus. The Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed: tanker traffic has collapsed to near zero, major shipping companies have suspended transits, and more than 150 vessels are anchored outside the strait. Oil prices, already in the mid- to high-$70s before the escalation, have surged into the $80s.

Iran struck Saudi Arabia's Ras Tanura refinery and hit facilities in Qatar including Ras Laffan, temporarily halting LNG production. The US consulate in Dubai was hit by drones. The CIA headquarters in Riyadh was reportedly struck. An Amazon Web Services data center in the UAE lost power after being hit by Iranian munitions. Qatar shot down two Iranian Su-24 bombers — becoming the first nation to down Iranian aircraft in the conflict.

Against this backdrop, the strikes on Azerbaijan are not an aberration. They are the northern front of a regime-wide strategy to maximize damage to every node of the US-aligned regional order. Azerbaijan is a legitimate target in Tehran's eyes: it cooperates closely with Israel on defense and intelligence, supplies a significant share of Israel's crude oil through the BTC pipeline, and signed a US-brokered peace deal that granted Washington exclusive development rights to a strategic corridor on Iran's northern border. But understanding why Iran struck Azerbaijan is not the same as concluding that doing so was wise. To the contrary, the decision to attack Baku reveals a regime so consumed by the impulse to punish perceived enemies that it has lost the ability to weigh consequences.

Telegraphed Aggression

The attacks on Nakhchivan did not emerge from a vacuum. Tehran spent months publicly signaling that Azerbaijan was in the crosshairs — warnings that Western analysts largely dismissed.

In August 2025, days after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a US-brokered peace treaty at the White House, Ali Akbar Velayati — a senior adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader — issued an extraordinary threat. "Mr. Trump thinks the Caucasus is a piece of real estate he can lease for 99 years," he told the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency. "This passage will not become a gateway for Trump's mercenaries — it will become their graveyard." The passage in question was the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), the US-backed land corridor through southern Armenia linking Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave and, by extension, to Turkey and Europe.

Velayati described TRIPP not as a trade route but as "a political plot" designed to position NATO "like a viper" between Iran and Russia. The IRGC's political deputy, Yadollah Javani, compared Aliyev and Pashinyan to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — a leader who, in Tehran's framing, invited hostile foreign forces into a neighbor's security zone and reaped catastrophe.

By January 2026, the threats had sharpened from geopolitical rhetoric to operational doctrine. Fars News Agency, an IRGC-affiliated outlet, published an explicit targeting framework. Israel's growing energy dependence on Azerbaijani oil, it argued, "transforms Azerbaijan into part of the security chain of the Zionist regime and places it on the front line of Iran's targeting." The piece articulated what it called a strategy of "preemptive regional defense": in any conflict, strikes would fall not only on the primary adversary but on the military bases, infrastructure, and interests of any country providing territory or capabilities for operations against Iran. "The red line has been drawn," Fars warned, "and crossing it will place Azerbaijan directly in Tehran's crosshairs."

On March 3 — just two days before the Nakhchivan strikes — the Masaf Institute, an IRGC-linked think tank, published a call to action on Telegram: "Tehran is being bombed from the Baku direction and the northern corridor... Now that we've gone all in, why are we still showing consideration for Baku? Strike that cursed Aliyev and dress him in mourning."

Simultaneously, an adviser to the IRGC commander warned that Tehran would target "the enemy's oil supply lines" and would not allow oil exports benefiting its adversaries to continue. Middle East Eye reported that senior Arab sources interpreted this as a direct reference to the BTC pipeline, one of the largest suppliers of Israel's crude oil.

The progression is unmistakable: from Velayati's August rhetoric to Fars News's January doctrine to Masaf Institute's March incitement to actual drone strikes within 48 hours. Each statement moved closer to operational language. Each was published through channels with direct IRGC connections — institutional organs of the security state.

Why the Strikes Are Suicidal

Iran has grievances against Azerbaijan. Some are real: Baku's deepening defense partnership with Israel, the flow of Caspian oil to Israeli refineries, and Washington's growing strategic footprint on Iran's northern border. But attacking Azerbaijan is the geopolitical equivalent of throwing a Molotov Cocktail while standing in gasoline. The risks are not proportional to any conceivable gain — and they threaten to accelerate the very encirclement Tehran fears.

Start with military reality. Azerbaijan's 2025 defense budget reached approximately $5 billion, and — as I wrote previously for the Turan Research Center — the money has gone overwhelmingly into systems designed for precisely the kind of threat Iran now poses. Post-2020, Baku has acquired Israeli-supplied Ice Breaker long-range standoff missiles, LORA ballistic missiles, Barak-8 and Barak MX air-defense systems, Harop and SkyStriker loitering munitions, Hermes 900 and Heron MALE-class drones, and advanced coastal and maritime surveillance platforms. This is not a force built for another campaign in Karabakh. It is a force built for Iranian contingencies — maritime denial in the Caspian, protection of offshore energy platforms, and defense of infrastructure corridors. Iran is now provoking a military that has spent years preparing for this exact scenario. Tehran also has a history of cultivating proxy infrastructure inside Azerbaijan — the Husseiniyyun, a Hezbollah-modeled group created under Qassem Soleimani's supervision in 2015, which has carried out assassination attempts, plotted attacks on the Israeli embassy, and runs an extensive propaganda network from Qom. But whatever disruptive potential these networks once held, the current crisis may have neutralized their utility: Baku's security services are now on maximum alert, and the political climate has turned overwhelmingly against Iran.

Then there is Turkey. The 2021 Shusha Declaration commits Ankara and Baku to consult and take joint action if either country's sovereignty, territorial integrity, or security is threatened by a third state. Turkey's foreign minister immediately called his Azerbaijani counterpart after the Nakhchivan strike and issued a statement "strongly" condemning the attack, adding that "Turkey will continue to stand by Azerbaijan, as it has historically." Turkey has demonstrated its willingness to project military power — in Libya, Syria, and the 2020 Karabakh war. So far, Ankara has stayed out of the Iran conflict. Striking Azerbaijani territory is the single fastest way to change that calculus, potentially drawing NATO's second-largest military into the war — a threshold Tehran has every reason to avoid but seems incapable of respecting.

Perhaps most dangerously for the regime, the strikes risk catalyzing Iran's own internal fault lines. An estimated third of Iran's 90 million population are ethnic Azerbaijanis, concentrated in the northwest — the country's second-largest ethnic group after Persians. Aliyev's statement during the Security Council meeting following the strikes that "the independent Azerbaijani state today is a source of hope for many Azerbaijanis living in Iran" is not rhetorical posturing. It reflects a genuine and long-standing Iranian vulnerability. Tehran has tried for years to cultivate Khomeinist loyalty among its Azerbaijani population, with mixed results: many remain hostile to the regime due to ethnic discrimination and systematic cultural repression. A shooting war with Baku could transform latent grievance into active destabilization at the worst possible moment for a regime already battered by US-Israeli strikes and facing a leadership vacuum after the killing of Khamenei.

The diplomatic optics compound the damage. Aliyev recounted in his Security Council address that on the morning of the strikes, Iran's deputy foreign minister called Baku requesting assistance evacuating Iranian embassy personnel stranded in Lebanon. Aliyev ordered an aircraft dispatched immediately and declined Iran's offer to cover costs. Hours later, drones hit Nakhchivan. "To disregard such a gesture, to belittle it, and to conduct themselves in a base and ungrateful manner brings honor to no one," Aliyev said. The sequence frames Iran not merely as aggressive but as erratic and faithless — a narrative that resonates across the region and beyond.

Loss of Strategic Coherence

The pattern of Iranian retaliation since February 28 does not resemble escalation dominance. It resembles a regime that has lost the ability to distinguish between deterrence and self-destruction.

Striking Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar — countries that host US military infrastructure — is aggressive but follows a recognizable strategic logic: raise the costs for America's regional partners until they pressure Washington to stop. Striking Cyprus, where British bases supported operations, is reckless but at least tracks a military rationale. Striking Azerbaijan — a country with a powerful military, a mutual defense pact with Turkey, and demographic leverage over a third of Iran's own population — follows no rational cost-benefit analysis. The potential blowback dwarfs any tactical benefit.

The IRGC's role in this escalation is central. The Guards are not merely a military force; they are a parallel state. Through entities such as the Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the IRGC controls major infrastructure — railways, gas pipelines, dams, oil fields, ports, and energy projects — often through no-bid contracts. The bonyads, quasi-charitable foundations under Supreme Leader patronage, operate as vast conglomerates with tax exemptions, opaque finances, and dominance across industries from agriculture to banking to real estate. This institutional architecture creates powerful incentives for escalation: the IRGC's legitimacy and economic position depend on demonstrating potency and relevance, even — perhaps especially — when doing so is strategically counterproductive. The Guards' survival is inseparable from the narrative of resistance, and in a moment of existential crisis, institutional momentum overtakes rational cost-benefit analysis.

There are no visible defections within the security forces. The political system remains cohesive under pressure. But cohesion is not the same as competence. The regime is unified around a course of action that is simultaneously isolating it from every potential partner and neutral party in the region. As one Israeli analyst observed: Iran is uniting the Arab world, Europe, Turkey, and the Caucasus against itself, while handing its adversaries the legitimacy they previously lacked.

What This Means for US Policy

Iran's attacks on Nakhchivan and near the BTC pipeline should be understood as direct strikes on American strategic interests. TRIPP is not merely a trade route — it is the physical manifestation of US strategy to bypass Russian and Iranian chokepoints in Eurasia, connect Central Asian energy and critical minerals to European markets, and anchor American influence in a region where Washington has historically been a secondary player.

The vulnerability of BTC and TRIPP infrastructure to Iranian strikes now demands a policy response. Integrated air and missile defense along the corridor — potentially involving US, Turkish, and Israeli systems — should be elevated from a theoretical discussion to an operational priority. Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry has already stated that "these acts of aggression will not go unanswered." Baku is preparing response measures. Washington must decide whether to support its corridor partner's response or risk the perception — in Baku, Ankara, and across Central Asia — that American commitments evaporate under pressure.

Most critically, the terms of any future ceasefire must account for what the past week has revealed. Any deal that relieves pressure on the regime without addressing its capacity to strike regional infrastructure will leave TRIPP and BTC permanently vulnerable. Iran's nuclear program, its long-range missile arsenal, and its proxy networks must be treated as a single, indivisible package. Partial concessions would merely postpone the problem, allowing a battered but surviving regime to regroup and threaten the region again. The "maximum pressure" strategy loses its edge the moment relief arrives prematurely.

Iran's horizontal escalation is not a sign of strength. It is the flailing of a regime whose supreme leader is dead, whose military infrastructure is being systematically degraded, and whose institutional reflexes have overwhelmed whatever remains of strategic reason. Attacking Azerbaijan — a well-armed, Turkish-allied state with leverage over Iran's own ethnic fault lines — is the most self-defeating move in a week of self-defeating moves. The question now is not whether Iran's recklessness will be checked, but whether the international community will seize the moment to ensure it cannot regenerate.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.