On September 19, the day Azerbaijan began its offensive in the majority Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh, Marut Vanyan heard an ominous noise in the sky over his hometown. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not a military expert,\u201d Vanyan, a journalist, recalled. \u201cBut I heard very, very clearly\u2026 the roar above me. I\u2019m sure it was a drone.\u201d <\/p>\n
Vanyan, a lifelong resident of Stepanakert, once Nagorno-Karabakh\u2019s largest city, recognized the sound from 2020, when Azerbaijan waged a 44-day war for the territory and surrounding regions with the help of Turkish and Israeli weapons. <\/p>\n
Vanyan took a video of the sky above Stepanakert, gray and cloudy, the whine of a propeller distinct in the background, and posted it on X. <\/p>\n
According to Leonid Nersisyan, a defense analyst and researcher at the Applied Policy Research Institute (APRI) Armenia, an independent think tank, it was the sound of Israel Aerospace Industries\u2019 Harop, a loitering munition known for the piercing noise it produces as it descends on a target. <\/p>\n
Though their relationship is relatively discreet, Israeli equipment makes up most of Azerbaijan\u2019s arms imports, according to arms researchers. Azerbaijani officials touted Israel\u2019s weapons as integral to their country\u2019s success in Nagorno-Karabakh during the 2020 war. <\/p>\n
Now, as over 100,000 ethnic Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabakh in the latest conflict there, Israeli-Azerbaijani ties have come under scrutiny, with an editorial in Israel\u2019s most prominent left-wing newspaper Haaretz proclaiming that the country\u2019s \u201cfingerprints are all over the ethnic cleansing\u201d in Nagorno-Karabakh. <\/p>\n
Azerbaijan \u201cused Harop kamikaze strike drones\u2026Hermes-450 and Orbiter-1K, Orbiter-2, Orbiter-3 reconnaissance drones,\u201d the ex-officer said. All were produced by Israeli arms companies. <\/p>\n
Azerbaijan won the 2020 war in a little over a month, regaining much of the territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but populated and governed, until now, almost exclusively by ethnic Armenians, following the expulsion of ethnic Azeris in the late 1980s and early 1990s. <\/p>\n
September\u2019s battle barely took 24 hours, leaving the whole of Karabakh under the control of Azerbaijan after months of blockade. All of the roughly 120,000 ethnic Armenians in the territory have either fled to Armenia or are expected to flee, fearing full-fledged ethnic cleansing or mass atrocities, although Azerbaijan has insisted that it would respect their rights there. <\/p>\n
Azerbaijan and Israel are close military partners. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), more than 60% of Azerbaijani weapons imports came from Israel between 2017 and 2020, making up 13% of Israeli exports during the same period. SIPRI research reveals that Azerbaijan purchased a wide variety of drones, missiles, and mortars from Israel between 2010 and 2020. <\/p>\n
However, according to SIPRI senior researcher Pieter Wezeman, certain specifics are unknown about the extent of the ongoing Azerbaijani-Israeli weapons trade. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe had quite some information before 2020 and then it stops,\u201d Wezeman said. \u201cAnd that doesn\u2019t really make sense because in 2020 Azerbaijan used a significant amount of its equipment\u2026 Most likely they have continued their relationship with Israel, but that\u2019s about as far as we know.\u201d <\/p>\n
The trade is believed to be particularly active in periods just before Azerbaijan has gone to war. A March 2023 investigative report by Haaretz found that flights by an Azerbaijani airline between Baku and Ovda air base, the only airport in Israel through which explosives can be flown, spiked in the months just before Azerbaijan attacked separatist positions in Karabakh in September 2020. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t know what was on board, but very likely it is something related to the military equipment that Israel already has supplied to Azerbaijan before,\u201d Wezeman said. <\/p>\n
The weapons trade between Israel and Azerbaijan mirrors their diplomatic relationship, once described in a leaked US diplomatic cable as \u201clike an iceberg, nine-tenths of it\u2026 below the surface.\u201d Despite decades of bilateral cooperation, Azerbaijan only opened an embassy in Israel this year. <\/p>\n
But their ties go beyond guns and ammunition: OEC figures show that Israel bought 65% of its crude oil from Azerbaijan in 2021. The countries are also believed to share intelligence on Iran, Israel\u2019s archenemy, with which Azerbaijan shares a border and which has a substantial ethnic Azeri population that constitutes the country\u2019s largest minority. Azerbaijan has also reportedly allowed the Israeli spy agency Mossad to use it as a hub to spy on Iran. (The Israeli Ministry of Defense declined to comment on the matter.) <\/p>\n
According to Efraim Inbar, an expert on Israel-Azerbaijan relations and president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, ties between the two have grown stronger since 2020. <\/p>\n
In a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post, Armenia\u2019s ambassador to Israel said Israeli weapons are being fired at \u201cpeaceful civilians\u201d despite Israeli civil society being \u201cvery pro-Armenia in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh and recognition of the Armenian genocide.\u201d (Israel\u2019s government does not recognize the mass murder of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War I as genocide, fearing damage to its relationship with Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire.) <\/p>\n
But there is little political opposition in the country to selling arms to Azerbaijan, Inbar said. <\/p>\n
\u201cArms sales do not receive much publicity,\u201d he added. \u201cThe contribution of Israeli drones to Azerbaijan\u2019s war is well known, however. Israelis are proud of their weaponry. Arms sales are considered good for Israel.\u201d <\/p>\n
Yet despite their high visibility in Karabakh, the role of drones should not overshadow that of other Israeli weapons, according to Nersisyan, the defense analyst at APRI Armenia. <\/p>\n
\u201cPeople consider them to be some kind of a super weapon,\u201d he said. \u201cOf course, they are very important, but there are roles of other types of weapons.\u201d <\/p>\n
Among those are Israel\u2019s LORA missiles, which Azerbaijan first purchased from Israel in 2017 according to SIPRI. <\/p>\n
The question remains as to how far Israel is willing to go in supporting Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia. An ongoing border crisis between the two countries has resulted in Azerbaijani incursions into Armenian territory, and Azerbaijani troops currently occupy land well within Armenia\u2019s borders in its southern Syunik province. Many in Armenia worry that an emboldened Azerbaijan will attempt to invade their country, which Azerbaijan denies. Some fears center around Nakhchivan, a landlocked exclave of Azerbaijan that borders Turkey and Armenia, and Baku\u2019s desire for a transport corridor linking it with the rest of the country. <\/p>\n
\u201cAzerbaijan doesn\u2019t have any military goals or objectives on the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia,\u201d Hikmet Ajiyev, the foreign policy advisor to Ilham Aliyev, told Reuters on October 1. <\/p>\n