On July 15, Azerbaijan announced it was resuming consular services at a newly relocated embassy in Iran, after having suspended them in early 2023. The decision culminates a rapprochement between the neighboring countries after a series of developments led to an almost total breakdown of diplomatic relations.
The proximate cause of that breakdown was an assault on the Azerbaijani Embassy at its previous location in Tehran in January 2023, when a lone attacker killed one person and wounded several others. But a range of more significant factors lay behind Baku’s decision to suspend its diplomatic operations in Iran.
Bilateral relations had already grown tense after Azerbaijan defeated Armenia in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, leaving it in position to push for the so-called Zangezur Corridor—a passage through Armenian territory along the Iranian border that Baku has long sought to connect Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave. The corridor would effectively block Iran’s land route to Armenia, on which it depends as a link to Georgia and the Black Sea.