Stalingrad is a name most people will be familiar with, the city where Hitler’s armies famously suffered the defeat that turned the war.
Ask the same people to show Volgograd on a map, and the knowledge stops there.
The fact is that the city was never in itself important to Hitler. His armies were on a campaign to capture the ultimate prize of the Second World War, Baku. Volgograd stood in the way.
Hitler’s whole military plan for establishing his imagined thousand-year Reich was based on a steady and generous oil supply from Baku, once the biggest oil-producing region in the world.
The history of the region
Azeris are a Turkic-speaking people, native to their lands. The roots of modern Azeri identity can be traced back to the Safavid dynasty, founded by a Kurdish family from Kurdistan, and to the famous Qizilbash alliance of Turkic tribes.
An ordinary person will associate Shiism with Persians and the mullah regime ruling Tehran today, so it may be interesting to know that it was the Safavids who forced Shiism on the then mostly Sunni Persians, not the other way round. Their rivals, the Ottomans, were Sunni.
In the following centuries, Russian advances in the South Caucasus split Azerbaijan in two, following the treaties signed with the Qajars. Northern Azerbaijan eventually became an independent state in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
The Turks saw young Azerbaijan as an easy target. Its first elected president, Ebulfeyz Elchibey, was himself a pan-Turkist and Ankara’s man in Baku. He fell in 1993, when Heydar Aliyev, father of current President Ilham Aliyev, took power.
In March 1995, a coup organized by elements of the Turkish state attempted to bring Elchibey back. Aliyev crushed it and secured independence. What followed was the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, championed by the American strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, carrying Baku’s oil to the Mediterranean. Turkey charges $1.27 for every barrel that crosses its territory through the pipeline, a pipeline vital to Israel.
Tension between Azerbaijan and Turkey
Today, about 60% of Azeris worldwide live in Iran, in what is called South Azerbaijan, where they must go to school in Persian. Most Azeris there have made their peace with the Persian-first system Iran imposed under Reza Shah. They have not made the same peace with the way of life imposed by the mullahs.
Azeris were never ruled by the Turks; the two fought each other, as the historical annals record. What is new in their history is the independent Azeri state, the Republic of Azerbaijan, with its distinct identity and a rich lexicon influenced by Persian and Russian.
The Turkey of the Turks is a different story altogether, founded on a rigid, French-type national identity: one purified Turkish language, one nation, and brutal oppression when that doesn’t work. Kurds know it well.
What really underlies today’s tension between Azerbaijan and Turkey is Azerbaijan’s oil. It is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s next imperial target, as it was Hitler’s.
We are witnessing history in motion. Turkey’s imperial reach extends as far as the Horn of Africa and Libya, and it occupies a third of Cyprus and parts of Kurdish land in Syria and Iraq. And it does not stop there.
As I have argued in previous columns, true peace in our region can only be guaranteed by a grand alliance between Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Kurdistan, and a united Azerbaijan: the Peace Belt of the Eastern Mediterranean.
As the regime in Tehran crumbles, Turkey sees a unique opportunity to Turkify the Azeris. Countering it requires not only bravery but established alliances. Aliyev resists to secure his country’s independence against this vital threat, but doing this at home alone will not help. The Turks’ campaign is against the whole Azeri identity, and unless Baku champions the unity of all Azeris under one umbrella, it will always find itself on the defensive.
This month, when Erdogan’s advisers and AKP lawmakers attacked Azerbaijan’s secular school dress code, Aliyev answered that “everyone should know their place,” and his party accused the AKP of using the headscarf for “political manipulation and division.” Israel showed its support with the visit of President Isaac Herzog.
The time is now. Tehran is crumbling, but the Azeris of South Azerbaijan have not yet politicized for unification with their brothers and sisters in the North, and the Turks do not wait.
Kurds are the allies, as is Israel.
The road to peace passes through Kurdistan. Look at a map of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline: its Turkish stretch draws, almost perfectly, the northern and western borders of Kurdistan.
One needs bravery when faced with a foe like Hitler. Erdogan is that.
The writer, based in Vancouver, is a commentator on Kurdish affairs, Kurdistan, and international politics.