Azerbaijan at the Edge of Iran’s Crisis

The death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in American and Israeli strikes on Tehran has plunged the country into its deepest political crisis since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, setting off a tense struggle between hard-line security institutions and more pragmatic political figures over the future of the Islamic Republic.

For weeks, the governments of the Persian Gulf walked a diplomatic tightrope. Publicly and in private, they urged restraint in Washington. Envoys shuttled between capitals. Messages were passed quietly to Tehran. The aim was simple: prevent a direct American strike on the Islamic Republic and spare the region another war. Then the missiles came.

Early in the morning on February 28, the United States and Israel launched missile strikes on Iranian territory.

In 1926, delegates gathered in Baku for the First Turkological Congress and debated a question that would outlive empires and ideological blocs: could the Turkic world one day share a common alphabet? One hundred years later, in the same city, the idea has returned — not as an abstract aspiration, but as a structured project backed by presidents, parliaments and cultural institutions.