Kurtulmus was reported to emphasize Turkey’s and Azerbaijan’s “common stance on regional and global issues” during a meeting with his Azerbaijani counterpart Sahiba Gafarova held in Geneva on Monday. He met with Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonian there later in the day.
According to the official Turkish readout of the meeting with Gafarova, Kurtulmus said Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, greatly facilitated by Turkish military support, changed “the balance in the region” and created a “great opportunity for the Turkic world.” He added that the two Turkic allies hope that the “Zangezur corridor will be opened to benefit Azerbaijan, Turkey and other peoples of the region.”
Azerbaijan has been demanding such an extraterritorial corridor ever since the 2020 war. Turkey has backed these demands, linking their fulfillment by Armenia to the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in July that an agreement on the corridor would be the “final step” in the resolution of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
The head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency, Ibrahim Kalin, echoed that statement during a subsequent visit to Baku. Kalin was present at Erdogan’s talks with Armenian Prime Minister Pashinian held in New York late last month.
The Armenian government maintains that people and goods moving between Nakhichevan to the rest of Azerbaijan cannot be exempt from Armenian border controls and that the two nations should have only conventional transport links. Simonian was understood to reaffirm its stance during his talks with Kurtulmus held on the sidelines of the latest session of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
“If our position is known to them and if they continue to use that term [Zangezur corridor,] one can assume that they at least speak of an extraterritorial corridor, which is unacceptable to us,” Sargis Khandanian, the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on foreign relations, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday.
The corridor demanded by Baku and Ankara would pass through Syunik, the only Armenian region bordering Iran. The Islamic Republic has repeatedly warned against attempts to strip it of the common border and transport links with Armenia. Its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Pashinian in July that the corridor would also be “detrimental to Armenia.”