The Iranian army chief of staff, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, made the offer at a meeting with the visiting secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, Armen Grigorian, held late on Tuesday. Grigorian flew to Tehran on Sunday to discuss the aftermath of Azerbaijan’s military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh with top Iranian officials, including President Ebrahim Raisi.
Iranian media cited Bagheri as urging Armenia and Azerbaijan to deescalate tensions and resolve their disputes peacefully.
“Expressing Iran's readiness to dispatch observers to the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, the Iranian military official emphasized that there should not be any aggressive goal or intention behind the improvement of the defense capabilities of any country,” reported the Mehr news agency. It gave no details of the proposed deployment.
Grigorian’s office did not mention Bagheri’s offer in its readout of the meeting. It said the Armenian official praised “Iran’s position on the inviolability of borders in the region.”
The European Union deployed about a hundred monitors along Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan early this year after the Armenian government refused a similar mission proposed by the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Moscow has criticized Yerevan and said the EU monitors cannot prevent deadly fighting that periodically breaks out along the border.
Armenia - The foreign ministers of Armenia and Iran inaugurate the Iranian consulate in Syunik's capital Kapan, October 21, 2022.
The Azerbaijani takeover of Karabakh raised more fears in Yerevan that Baku will also attack Armenia to open an exterritorial land corridor to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave passing through Syunik, the sole Armenian province bordering Iran. President Ilham Aliyev and other Azerbaijani leaders regularly demand such a corridor.
Iran has repeatedly warned against attempts to strip it of the common border and transport links with Armenia. Meeting with Grigorian on Monday, Ali-Akbar Ahmadian, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, reaffirmed Tehran’s strong opposition to “any changes in the geopolitics of the region.”
For his part, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Grigorian that regional problems should be addressed “without external intervention” and in a “3+3 format” involving the three South Caucasus states as well as Iran, Turkey and Russia.
Bagheri similarly objected to the “presence of extra-regional forces” in the region. In that context, he repeated Tehran’s criticism of a U.S.-Armenian military exercise hosted by Armenia last month.