Messages of Azerbaijani Victory
The military victory achieved by Azerbaijan in its war to retrieve its occupied lands from Armenia indicates that a great strategic change has taken place on the international stage; namely, the rise of the role of Turkey that has imposed itself as an unignorable major player, after a hundred years of dependency.
Thanks to the use of sophisticated Turkish weapons, the Azerbaijani army has been able to put an end to the Armenian occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh region and liberate the six states that the Armenians had captured in the early nineties of last century.
With Turkish support, Azerbaijan has succeeded in only a few weeks to restore its land that it had failed to regain through negotiations over the course of three decades. Baku has also been able to crush the Armenian army that enjoys European and American support and owns the best weapons and modern air defense systems, where Turkish drones appeared roaming freely after they had taken control of the airspace in the occupied Azerbaijani region.
Turkish military superiority
One of the most important messages to the whole world from Nagorno Karabakh was the qualitative progress of Turkish sophisticated weapons and the success of the Turks in achieving a major boom in the military industries. Turkey has quickly jumped towards leadership in the field of electronic weapons and drones, armed with laser-guided smart missiles that accurately hit their targets, especially that these qualitative weapons had been tested before in Idlib, Syria, and then in Libya; but they reached their peak in the Azerbaijani occupied territories.
The Turkish Bayraktar and Phoenix drones manipulated the Armenian army, but the surprise of the war was the Alpagu suicide drones that bombed all air defense systems, including the Russian defense systems, most notably the S300, and took them out of service, without the radars being able to identify them.
The Armenian army could not use its advanced Russian fighters, where all the fighters that had tried to fly and enter the battle were shot down. With this, the Armenian air power was completely neutralized, which enabled the Azerbaijani army to recover its lands without great losses. The Azerbaijani army liberated most of occupied cities, entered the heart of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, took control of the strategic city of Shusha, and was close to entering the regional capital, Stepanakert.
Had the war continued for a few more days, the entire Armenian army would have been annihilated; but Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced surrender and asked Russia to intervene to save what has remained of his army. Russian President Vladimir Putin then used the shooting down of a Russian helicopter by the Azerbaijanis on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border as a pressure card to convince Baku to agree on a ceasefire.
With the gains that Azerbaijan has made in the ceasefire agreement, in fact the biggest winner from the battle is Turkey, which has imposed a new reality. Ankara has been able to open a path for communication with neighboring Muslim countries, expand its influence on its historical depth in the Caucasus with its Turkmen peoples, and revive the ethnic bond with the Muslim republics in Central Asia. This vast space represents a strategic gain for Turkey, as it has put an end to the boycott imposed on its contact with these peoples for more than a century.
A lesson for Iranian extremism
Turkey set an example in manifestation of Islamic unity, as it did not act with a narrow sectarian mentality. Although Shiite Muslims represent the majority of the Azeri people (55% Shiites and 45% Sunnis, according to the statement of Abdulaziz Al-Tuwaijri, the former Director General of ISESCO), Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan provided all support to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, including Turkish sophisticated weapons, to restore Azerbaijan’s land and dignity, with disregard of the major countries that support Armenia, especially France and Russia.
The fact that Turkey dealt with Azerbaijan from fraternal and ethnic grounds has exposed the Iranian position that was supportive of the Armenian Christians against their fellow Azeri Muslims. This Iranian position has revealed that the Iranians are moving on the basis of being Persians and not out of being Muslims, and that they only use Shiism to achieve their opportunistic goals. Iran supports Armenia to prevent Turkey from communicating by land with its sister countries of the former Soviet republics. This anti-brotherly fanaticism has angered the Iranians from Azerbaijani origins in northern Iran, who represent 20% of Iran’s population.
The Turkish lesson is very important in the arena of ideas; and it is a practical response to the extremist Shiites and a model of Islamic unity that can be built upon. The Turkish position is a realistic, practical response to Iranian practices that have corrupted the relationship between the Shiites and Sunnis due to cooperation with the Christian West at the expense of Muslims, which was manifested clearly in Tehran’s alliance with the United States in the latter’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its alliance with Russia in its invasion of Syria.
Do Armenians understand the lesson?
The humiliating defeat of Armenia comes after a long history of conflict between the Armenians and the Turks, as it terminates the ambitions of Armenians who have been only a tool in the hands of Russia and Western countries to stab the Turks from the back since the eighteenth century. But will this defeat may push the Armenians to rethink their aggressive behavior and search for a new way to coexist with the Turks and Muslims in general and turn a new page of tolerance and mutual interests instead of fanaticism that will never be in their favor?
The Armenians had lived in the Ottoman states in peace and tranquility, where the Turkish sultans had treated them with respect and appreciation, and sought their assistance in circles of higher authority. But as soon as the Russians invaded the Caucasus and Anatolia, the Armenians turned against the Turks and betrayed them, seeking to establish an Armenian state. They committed massacres against the Muslims, in order to displace them and evacuate the western Caucasus and eastern Anatolia, and their revolt against their neighbors adopted arsons and extermination.
Even the Armenians in southern Anatolia took advantage of the French occupation to commit massacres against Muslims who had previously lived with them in peace. And had it not been for the deportation of Armenians – under the protection of the Turkish government – from eastern Anatolia to safe places and cutting off supplies to the rebels there, the Muslims in eastern Turkey would have been exterminated and the fate of Anatolia would have become like Greece and the Balkans. In fact, current Armenia is an artificial state just like Israel; as it is used as a barrier entity to prevent Turkey from communicating with the Turkish peoples in the Caucasus and even China. Crusader fanaticism was fed into the Armenians that did not allow Muslims to live in Armenia; whereas Armenians live among Muslims in peace in the Arab countries, Turkey, and even Azerbaijan, despite the fact that its territories were occupied by Armenia.
Azerbaijani victory, a model that can be reproduced
What has been achieved in the Nagorno Karabakh war is an example of the importance of military cooperation with the Turks to defend rights and achieve independence. As everyone knows, the Arab and Muslim weakness for more than two centuries is due to the Western military superiority and the control of the colonial powers’ fleets over oceans and seas. This superiority continued with the manufacture of more combat aircraft, missiles, and air defense systems. Today, Turkey has succeeded in manufacturing something that may achieve balance.
Until now, Western countries have controlled the Muslim world and plundered its wealth, and prevented the export of qualitative weapons that would achieve a degree of superiority for any Muslim country to defend itself. The United States and Europe guarantee the Israeli military superiority over all the Arab countries combined. And this military weakness has been behind the state of strategic defeat that Muslims have been experiencing.
Today, the way is open for breaking away from Western hegemony and for quitting the American and European grip, as Turkish technology has become available. Turkish President Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party have succeeded in escaping the restrictions of hegemony and achieving independence. In more than one confrontation, events have proved that the new Turkey has stood firmly in front of the Western hegemony, which has begun to weaken and become disrupted, especially with the international changes, including the rise of old empires and the end of the unipolar system.
Despite the apparent conspiracies and incitement of some Arab governments against Turkey, Turkish success will ultimately impose itself on the wise ones among Arab leaders. The success of the Turks will correct many misconceptions, and make many sincere national circles in the Islamic world seek, albeit unvoluntary, to seek communication with the Turks and benefit from an honest ally that has no colonial ambitions and welcomes provision of unconditional military support to sister countries.
The Muslim world has a historic opportunity to put an end to the state of defeat it has been experiencing, and to join victories under the current favorable international conditions: amid the voluntary closure of major countries due to the coronavirus, the US preoccupation with its own internal conflict between Donald Trump and his conservative supporters on the one hand, and Joe Biden and the minorities rallying around the Democratic Party on the other, and the European crises, especially in France that might have realized that its colonial rule is coming to an end.
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