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Azerbaijan has granted Israel access to airbases in its territory along Iran's northern border for potential use in a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, a report published Wednesday in Foreign Policy magazine quoted senior US administration officials as saying. "The Israelis have bought an airfield," an official said, "and the airfield is called Azerbaijan." Even if Israel doesn't use the fields for a direct airstrike on Iran, Azerbaijan could still prove useful for Jerusalem's interests in the region. The bases could be used as a jumping point for IDF search-and-rescue units, the report quoted a US intelligence official as...

SNIPPET: "Azerbaijan has arrested 22 people on suspicion of plotting attacks on the US and Israeli embassies in Baku on behalf of neighbouring Iran, the national security ministry said Wednesday." SNIPPET: ""On orders of the Sepah they were to commit terrorist acts against the US, Israeli and other Western states' embassies and the embassies' employees," it said. The ministry said that the suspects were recruited from 1999 onwards and trained in the use of weapons and spy techniques at military camps in Iran to enable them to gather information on foreign embassies, organisations and companies in Azerbaijan and stage attacks,...

Azerbaijan authorities have arrested 22 people suspected of plotting to attack the Israeli and American embassies in the capital Baku, AFP reported on Wednesday. Iran's Revolutionary Guards was reportedly behind the plan to attack Israeli and U.S. targets in the country, according to Azerbaijan's national security ministry.

22 arrested in Azerbaijan in plot on US, Israeli embassies Published March 14, 2012 | FoxNews.com Officials in Azerbaijan have arrested 22 people suspected of plotting attacks on the American and Israeli embassies in the capital Baku, the Agence France Presse is reporting. The plot was reportedly on behalf of Azerbaijan’s neighbor, Iran, according to the national security ministry. "Twenty-two citizens of Azerbaijan have been arrested by the national security ministry for cooperating with the Iranian Sepah," the ministry said, referring to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, according to AFP. "On orders of the Sepah, they were to commit terrorist acts...

Iran is confident that neighboring Azerbaijan would not allow attacking forces to pass through its territory, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Monday, according to the official IRNA news agency. Ahmadinejad told visiting Azerbaijan Defense Minister Gen. Safar Abiyev, “We are sure that no problem will take place against Iran from (the land of) our friend and brother, Azerbaijan.” Earlier, Abiyev, told reporters Azerbaijan will not act against “great Iran” or allow an attack using its territory. This came after he met his Iranian counterpart, Gen. Ahmad Vahidi. Ahmadinejad said, “Joint enemies of the two countries seek to stop improvement relations...

    Summer 2000 (8.2) Scandinavian Ancestry Tracing Roots to Azerbaijan by Thor Heyerdahl Above: Thor Heyerdahl with Peruvian children who still construct traditional boats made of reeds, the principle material that enabled early migrations on trans-oceanic voyages. Courtesy: Thor Heyerdahl. Archeologist and historian Thor Heyerdahl, 85, has visited Azerbaijan on several occasions during the past two decades. Each time, he garners more evidence to prove his tantalizing theory - that Scandinavian ancestry can be traced to the region now known as Azerbaijan. Heyerdahl first began forming this hypothesis after visiting Gobustan, an ancient cave dwelling found 30 miles ...

Iran challenged Azerbaijan on Tuesday over $1.5 billion in arms it said were purchased from arch-foe Israel, state media reported, in a sign of further strains between the neighbouring countries. Azebaijan's ambassador to Tehran was called in to the foreign ministry to explain the weapons and to receive a warning that Israel must not be permitted to use Azerbaijan to stage "terrorist acts" against Iran. -excerpt- The reports came a week after police in Azerbaijan said they arrested an unspecified number of people linked to Iran and to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on suspicion of planning attacks in the...

Israel to sell $1.6 billion in arms to Iran's neighbor Azerbaijan The sales come at a delicate time. Israel has been laboring hard to form diplomatic alliances in a region that seems to be growing increasingly hostile to the Jewish state. JERUSALEM — Israeli defense officials Sunday confirmed $1.6 billion in deals to sell drones as well as anti-aircraft and missile-defense systems to Azerbaijan, bringing sophisticated Israeli technology to the doorstep of archenemy Iran. The sales by state-run Israel Aerospace Industries come at a delicate time. Israel has been laboring hard to form diplomatic alliances in a region that seems...

Racism against Turks in Iran Documentary on Iranian Azerbaijanis who have escaped to Turkey "Our documentary film's issue is Azerbaijani Turks in Iran who had to escape from Iran and temporary live in Turkey under United Nations refugee status who are out of having education in their own language (mother tongue) as their basic rights which is issued in Iranian constitution (basic law) and sustain to be assimilated and also because of supporting their fundamental (basic) rights as human or citizens of Iran, they and their families were threatened , arrested, tortured and kept out of their social rights as...

Racist Supremacist Islamic Iranian [so-called] "aryans" found their excuse to target Azeris THE OPPORTUNITY/EXCUSE Iran summons Azeri envoy over Mossad allegations Beaver County Times - Feb. 13, 2012 Iran's state-run news agency says the country's foreign ministry has summoned Azerbaijan's ambassador to protest alleged Israeli intelligence activity in..http://www.timesonline.com/news/world/middle-east/iran-summons-azeri-envoy-over-mossad-allegations/article_0987bf4c-f8df-5f6f-8cef-b25bce4ca604.html THE TRUTHNew statesman: Volume 21, Issues 1036-1049 – Page 7 – New Statesman Ltd., 2008 Tehran terror Your report "Inside Iran" (15 September) covered many important issues, but neglected one of the most fundamental: the racist, Persian-supremacist character of the Tehran regime and its neocolonial subjugation of the country's national minorities, especially...

In a move that was decried by the U.S., France, and Arab countries, Russia and China on Saturday vetoed a U.S.-backed proposal at the UN Security Council to condemn Syrian leader Bashar al-Assed for violence against Syrian citizens. The resolution that had demanded that Assad resign was backed by the Arab League, and the League on Saturday night called on Arab countries to shut down their embassies and consulates in Syria, and remove Syrian ambassadors from their countries. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said that Washington was "disgusted" by the vetoes. The vetoes followed a particularly bloody night...

"Azerbaijan thwarts terror attack against Israeli, Jewish targets Security official in Baku links Iran to planned operation; three men detained." SNIPPET: "Three men were detained last week after planning to attack two Israelis employed by a Jewish school in Baku, the Azerbaijan Ministry of National Security has revealed. Meanwhile, an Azeri commentator considered close to the republic's president has launched a scathing indictment of Iran. The Azeri ministry said it had arrested a cell that planned to "kill public activists," before it became apparent that the intended victims were two Israeli Chabad emissaries, a rabbi and a teacher employed by...

The news that the Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar will be visiting Armenia mid-January might come as a surprise to some. Yet, Iran has always seen its Armenian population as well as its links with Armenia as an important asset. Armenians are the most favoured and relatively privileged of all non-Muslim communities in Iran today. It is tricky to establish the exact number of ethno-religious minorities in the country since the official numbers are politically shaped and minority communities guard such details and often are not clear themselves. However, various sources estimate that there are around 300,000 Baha'is, 110,000...

Turkey's high-flying economy, which expanded at a 10 percent annual rate of gross domestic product growth during the first half of 2011,[1] will crash-land in 2012. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan's "economic miracle," to use the Daily Telegraph's admiring words,[2] depended on a 40 percent annual rate of bank credit expansion, which in turn produced a balance of payments deficit as wide as that of southern Europe's crisis countries. Markets have already anticipated a sudden turnaround in the Turkish economy. The Turkish lira (TRY) fell by a quarter between November 2010 and September 2011, making it the world's worst performing...

Mideast: Our premature departure from Iraq tells the world that the U.S., as in Vietnam, can't finish big jobs. But far worse, it opens the door to a nuclear-armed, pan-Islamist empire led by Iran. Why, as Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported Thursday, did Iraqi leaders opt out of the official end-of-war ceremony in Baghdad? Well over 4,000 U.S. servicemen and women gave their lives to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein, and some 32,000 were wounded over nearly a decade of war. Shouldn't the elected representatives of the Iraqi people have been there to express their personal thanks? After all,...

The Arab League voted to suspend SyriaÂ’s membership at its meeting on Saturday and said it would impose economic and political sanctions against the regime of Bashar al-Assad as well as call for the withdrawal of Arab ambassadors from Damascus. The Arab foreign ministers meeting at the LeagueÂ’s headquarters in Cairo also called on the Syrian army to cease its involvement in the killing of civilians and invited the Syrian opposition for transition talks. Opponents of Assad were hoping that the Arab League would suspend SyriaÂ’s membership after Assad pressed ahead with a military crackdown on the unrest despite an...

The government of Iran, much like many across the Middle East, believes that the Obama administration is so consumed with a desire to undo the wrongs of the Bush era and get out from under the costs of two difficult, hard-to-justify wars in the region that it would never intervene against them militarily. Iranian leaders seem to believe that the United States would not risk another war in the region just to stop their development of nuclear weapons. The government of Israel, also worried that its number one ally has lost its appetite for complex entanglements in the region, seems...

Azerbaijan is expected to acquire 60 small Israeli-designed unmanned aerial vehicles built under license in the oil-rich former Soviet republic that's moving closer to the Jewish state as the Baku government modernizes its military. The burgeoning military and intelligence alliance between the countries is causing growing concern in Iran, Azerbaijan's southern neighbor, and in nearby longtime rival Armenia. The Israeli Aerostar and Orbiter 2M UAVs are being manufactured by Baku's Azad Systems Co., a joint venture between Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry and Aeronautics Defense Systems of Israel.

The USSR might have imploded two decades ago, but debris from its headlong industrialization drive litter the post-Soviet landscape, and nothing more unsettles the population of the fifteen new nations carved out of the Soviet Union than its nuclear legacy. The poster child for Caucasian nuclear concerns is Armenia’s aging Metsamor nuclear power plant, which provides nearly 40 percent of the country’s electricity. The facility has not only alarmed neighboring Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan but begun to receive international notice as well - on 11 April National Geographic ran a story entitled “Is Armenia’s Nuclear Plant the World’s Most Dangerous?”...

President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has disposed to erect a monument to distinguished Azerbaijani commander Babek. Under the decree the monument will be erected to educate young generation in a patriotic spirit. Executive Branch of Baku city has been charged to submit proposals on the monument erection to Azerbaijani President at a month’s notice. The Cabinet of Ministers has been charged to solve the issues following the decree. Babek (Babak Khorramdin or Hasan on one of sources) was born in Ardebil (modern Iran) , as a leader of Khurramits (Zoroastrian sect) waged an armed struggle with Arab expansion and Islamization...