Azerbaijan Sends Aid to Iran After Nakhchivan Strike Denial
By Bosphorus News Geopolitics Desk
Azerbaijan sent 30 tons of humanitarian aid to Iran on March 10, dispatching food, medicine and drinking water days after a phone call between President Ilham Aliyev and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.
The shipment followed Aliyev’s statement during that call that Baku was ready to provide humanitarian assistance to Iran. It also came after Azerbaijan eased some practical restrictions on cross-border traffic, lifting cargo limits at the Iranian border on March 9 and resuming direct flights from Baku to Nakhchivan.
The diplomatic contact came after the March 5 drone strikes on Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhchivan. The attacks hit Nakhchivan International Airport and a school in the nearby village of Şəkərabad, injuring four people. Baku blamed Iran for the strike.
Pezeshkian told Aliyev that Tehran had no connection to the attack and said the incident would be investigated. He did not point to any other source.
That denial did not change Azerbaijan’s public position. As of March 9, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry was still maintaining that Iran had carried out the Nakhchivan drone strikes.
The exchange nonetheless showed that direct contact was still functioning at a tense moment. The aid shipment, the easing of cargo restrictions and the return of direct flights all suggested that Baku did not want the crisis at the border to deepen further.
Türkiye also appeared in the same pattern of Iranian messaging. In a separate phone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Pezeshkian said the ballistic missiles that entered Turkish airspace were not of Iranian origin. NATO intercepted two such missiles over southern Türkiye on March 4 and March 9.
That placed Baku and Ankara inside the same regional sequence. In both cases, Tehran moved to reject responsibility for incidents that had raised tensions with neighbouring states as the wider conflict environment continued to spill across borders.
The Nakhchivan strike had already come at a sensitive moment. Days earlier, Azerbaijani security services said they had foiled a plot linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeting the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and several Jewish sites in the country. In that context, the aid shipment did not erase the crisis. It showed that Baku was still willing to keep contact alive even as the accusations remained in place.