Category: Azer News

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev sent a message to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the occasion of July 15 Democracy and National Unity Day, paying tribute to those who lost their lives while defending Trkiye during the failed coup attempt and reaffirming the enduring strategic partnership between the two countries.

In his message, President Ilham Aliyev expressed his profound respect for all the martyrs who sacrificed their lives in defense of their homeland during the coup attempt orchestrated by the FETÖ terrorist organization. He extended his deepest condolences to the families of the victims and to the brotherly people of Trkiye.

President Ilham Aliyev described July 15 as one of the most tragic, yet at the same time one of the most honorable chapters in Trkiye’s modern history. He stressed that the treacherous coup attempt, which sought to overthrow the constitutional order, undermine the institutions of the state, suppress the national will, and destroy the country’s democratic foundations, was decisively defeated thanks to the unwavering determination, courage, and patriotism of the Turkish people.

The Azerbaijani president noted that the sight of thousands of citizens taking to the streets to defend their state, national flag, and fundamental values has become a timeless symbol of heroism that will remain engraved in the collective memory of the Turkish nation.

Addressing President Erdogan directly, President Ilham Aliyev said:

“Your resolute and far-sighted leadership, together with the unwavering unity of the Turkish people around you and their immediate and unquestioning response to your calls, became one of the decisive factors that saved your country from a major catastrophe on that fateful night. Under your leadership, Trkiye emerged from this ordeal even stronger and once again demonstrated to the world the strength of its national will and the resilience of its statehood traditions.”

President Ilham Aliyev emphasized that the events of July 15 clearly demonstrated that no treacherous plot or destructive force can succeed when confronted by the unity of a nation and its state. He added that Democracy and National Unity Day, commemorated annually, has become a powerful symbol of the Turkish people’s national solidarity, fighting spirit, long-standing state traditions, and unwavering commitment to freedom.

The Azerbaijani leader also underscored that, guided by the principle of “One Nation, Two States,” Azerbaijan stood firmly alongside its brotherly nation throughout the coup attempt, just as it always has. He said this solidarity once again proved the exceptional strength and unbreakable nature of the fraternal ties binding the peoples of Azerbaijan and Trkiye.

President Ilham Aliyev further stated that the friendship and brotherhood between the two nations constitute a lasting legacy that will be passed on to future generations. He expressed confidence that the strategic alliance between Azerbaijan and Trkiye will continue to deepen through joint efforts, gaining new dimensions and becoming even stronger in the years ahead.

Concluding his message, President Ilham Aliyev wished President Erdogan good health and continued success in his duties, while extending his sincere wishes for lasting peace, prosperity, and well-being to the brotherly Republic of Trkiye.

Heavy rainfall in Russia’s Sverdlovsk Region has caused flooding that submerged another 130 residential houses and 185 household plots over the past 24 hours, AzerNEWS reports.

The information was released by the press service of the Main Directorate of Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations (EMERCOM) for the Sverdlovsk Region.

The city of Irbit was the hardest hit, with 124 homes flooded. Meanwhile, the largest number of flooded household plots was recorded in the city of Nevyansk, where 84 yards were affected.

According to EMERCOM, a total of 443 residential houses and 1,792 household plots across the region remain under water.

Earlier, around 200 children and several dozen adults were evacuated to safe areas from the Irbit municipality due to the flooding.

As of the evening update, the water level in the Nitsa River in Irbit had reached 805 centimeters, exceeding the levels recorded during almost all previous floods in the city.

In accordance with the military cooperation plan between the Ministries of Defense of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Trkiye, the main planning conference for the “Eternity-2026” computer-assisted command-and-staff exercise to be held in Azerbaijan took place, AzerNEWS reports.

The exercise, scheduled for November,2026, will involve military personnel from the three participating countries, as well as representatives of the State Agency for Protection of Strategic Facilities of the Republic of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan Railways.

It should be noted that the exercise is based on a scenario involving the tactical-level protection and defense of strategic facilities and communication lines across the territories of the participating countries.

During the conference, the exercise theme and objectives, the composition of the joint headquarters, the conduct of field tactical episodes, as well as other organizational matters were discussed.

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s approval rating has fallen to 55%, according to the latest National Barometer Survey conducted from Monday to Wednesday, AzerNEWS reports.

The survey shows that positive evaluations of Lee’s performance declined by 3 percentage points compared to the previous poll, while his disapproval rating edged down by 1 percentage point to 34%.

Support for the ruling Democratic Party also slipped, falling 4 percentage points to 38%. Meanwhile, backing for the main opposition People Power Party rose by 2 percentage points to 22%, suggesting a modest shift in the political landscape.

The poll also examined public opinion on the government’s proposal to establish a joint military academy for the army, navy, and air force. The initiative was opposed by 55% of respondents, while only 34% expressed support.

Critics, including representatives from several military branches and the People’s Progressive Party (NPP), argue that merging the training systems could weaken the specialized expertise of each service and ultimately reduce the overall combat effectiveness of South Korea’s armed forces. Supporters, however, believe the reform could improve inter-service coordination and prepare officers for the increasingly complex nature of modern warfare.

The survey was conducted by Embrain Public, Kstat Research, Korea Research, and Hankook Research among 1,000 South Korean adults aged 18 and older, making it one of the country’s most closely watched public opinion polls.

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev received Mohammad Mustafa, Prime Minister of the State of Palestine, on July 16, AzerNEWS reports.

The head of state expressed confidence that Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa’s visit to Azerbaijan would contribute to further strengthening the fraternal relations between Azerbaijan and Palestine.

President Ilham Aliyev reaffirmed Azerbaijan’s support for the establishment of an independent and sovereign State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Expressing his pleasure at meeting with the head of state, Mohammad Mustafa conveyed the greetings of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the State of Palestine, to President Ilham Aliyev.

The Azerbaijani President thanked him for the greetings and asked the Prime Minister to convey his own greetings to President Mahmoud Abbas. President Ilham Aliyev fondly recalled Mahmoud Abbas’s visits to Azerbaijan and their meetings on the sidelines of international events.

Noting the difficult situation currently facing Palestine, Mohammad Mustafa expressed hope that, with the support of friendly countries, Palestine would be able to overcome the current challenges. He thanked President Ilham Aliyev for Azerbaijan’s continued support, including the decision to build a secondary school in Palestine as part of the country’s humanitarian assistance.

During the meeting, the opening of Azerbaijan’s Representative Office in Ramallah, as well as Azerbaijan’s coverage of the operational expenses of the Palestinian Embassy in Baku, was described as a testament to the high level of bilateral relations.

The sides also recalled that Azerbaijan had allocated $5 million in financial assistance to Palestine following the Conference on the Establishment of the Islamic Financial Safety Net and the Donors’ Conference to Finance the Strategic Plan for the Development of the City of Al-Quds Al-Sharif, held in Azerbaijan in 2013. It was noted that Azerbaijan continues to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestine through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The meeting also highly appreciated the fact that 23 Palestinian students are currently studying in Azerbaijan under the Heydar Aliyev International Education Grant, bringing the total number of Palestinian students in the country to 37.

Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa expressed his gratitude to the Azerbaijani President for this support.

The sides also discussed the export of selected Palestinian agricultural products to Azerbaijan under preferential terms and exchanged views on other issues of mutual interest.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has postponed his official visit to the United States that had been scheduled for next week, AzerNEWS reports, citing Israel’s Ynet news portal.

According to the report, Netanyahu had planned to travel to the US to attend the farewell ceremony for US Senator Lindsey Graham, who died on July 11.

The visit was postponed after Graham’s funeral was delayed and is now expected to take place later this month.

Earlier, The Times of Israel reported that Netanyahu had also planned to meet with US President Donald Trump during the trip. According to the newspaper, Israeli officials had been discussing the possibility of arranging such a meeting with the White House in the coming weeks, even before Graham’s death.

No new date for Netanyahu’s visit has been officially announced.

Discussions are underway with several airlines over expanding international flights to Gabala International Airport, with one carrier assessing the possibility of developing the airport into a regional aviation hub similar to Georgia’s Kutaisi Airport, AzerNEWS reports.

The announcement was made by Rashad Aliyev, Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of the Azerbaijan Tourism Bureau (ATB) under the State Tourism Agency.

According to Aliyev, activating regional airports and expanding international air connectivity are among the key priorities of Azerbaijan’s new state tourism development program.

“Negotiations are currently being held with several airlines regarding the launch of flights to Gabala. One airline is even evaluating the possibility of using Gabala Airport as a regional hub based on the Kutaisi model in Georgia,” he said.

Aliyev noted that the initiative is aimed at boosting tourist arrivals to Azerbaijan’s regions and making greater use of the country’s tourism potential.

He added that the resumption of international flights from regional airports is one of the program’s main objectives.

“One of our primary goals is to activate regional airports and restore international flights. Joint work in this direction is being carried out with relevant state institutions and airlines,” he said.

According to the ATB official, increasing the number of international flights to regional airports would enable foreign visitors to travel directly to different parts of Azerbaijan, contributing to the further development of regional tourism.

The meeting of the Azerbaijan-Serbia Joint High-Level Working Group Meeting on Military Cooperation took place in Baku, AzerNEWS reports.

International Military Cooperation Department of the Azerbaijan Ministry of Defense hosted a meeting between the delegations headed by the Acting Chief of the Main Department of Military-Technical Supply, Major General Farid Aliyev and Head of Serbia’s Defense Technologies Department, Major General Slavko Rakic.

In the subsequent phase of the meeting, subgroups representing various functional areas held discussions on the Digital Army, AI, cybersecurity, air defense, unmanned systems, and the organization of joint training and military exercises.

The delegations also assessed the current state of military and military-technical cooperation and engaged in a comprehensive exchange of views on the expansion of bilateral cooperation, as well as on other issues of common interest.

U.S. President Donald Trump has shared on his Truth Social platform a Breitbart News article featuring remarks by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev delivered during the 4th Shusha Global Media Forum, AzerNEWS reports.

The article highlighted President Aliyev’s assessment of Trump’s role in advancing peace efforts between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Responding to a question from Breitbart News about how Trump’s approach differed from the policies of previous administrations in the process of reaching the historic peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia, brokered by the United States and signed at the White House in August last year, the President said that the U.S. leader’s success was driven by a fundamentally different approach to resolving protracted conflicts.

According to the President Ilham Aliyev, previous administrations pursued a policy for nearly three decades that effectively resulted in the freezing of the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, whereas Trump approached its resolution from a completely different perspective.

Donald Trump reposted the Breitbart News article on his Truth Social account, making the publication available to his millions of followers.

Earlier, speaking at the 4th Shusha Global Media Forum, President Aliyev praised the U.S. president’s contribution to efforts aimed at achieving historic understandings between Azerbaijan and Armenia, emphasizing the importance of dialogue and diplomacy in advancing regional peace.

For a government that has spent a decade building a tourism industry around five-star hotel chains, Formula 1 circuits and international summits clustered in a single city, the message from the World Bank last week in Baku has been eye-catching. Azerbaijan, according to the World Bank, ‘has to stop branding itself as Baku and develop a non-hydrocarbons economy for the rest of the country, or risk wasting one of its few sectors that can offer employment to those who will lose jobs in the hydrocarbon sector.’

The occasion was the presentation of the World Bank’s “Azerbaijan Country Economic Memorandum Spring 2026”, unveiled at an event titled “Unlocking Azerbaijan’s Tourism Potential to Drive Economic Growth and Diversification”. According to Rolande Pryce, the World Bank’s regional director for the South Caucasus, tourism must move away from cities to focus on the regions, since the industry does not live up to its full potential in terms of visitor numbers and employment. As one might have expected, the choice of date was deliberate, since according to the World Bank’s estimates, the growth of the country’s economy in 2025 was only 1.4 percent, and given the latest numbers, it does not look like it will exceed it.

Perhaps, none of this is abstract for Baku’s planners. The country’s tourism recovery, robust through 2022-24, has since gone into reverse. The number of foreign arrivals in the first five months of 2026 contracted 11% compared to the previous year to 871,700 people, and the expenditure of international tourists plummeted by almost 23% to nine hundred and forty-four million manats. This followed a 2025 in which tourist numbers from Russia, India, and various Middle Eastern markets were declining. The issue is also identified by the World Bank in its structural form, and there are only three or four major sources of foreign tourists to the country.

As mentioned by the World Bank’s Senior Private Sector Development Specialist Shaun Mann at the forum, ‘development of air connections is crucial in promoting tourism: while developing tourism destinations, one needs to work together with the airline industry for launching new air connections.’ The main issue is to offer tourists not only Baku, but the ‘Baku+’ experience, to encourage visitors to travel to the regions and stay in the country for longer.

Prescription by the Bank is based on lessons learned somewhere else. Shaun Mann cited examples of Bali, Machu Picchu, and Reykjavik, where there was an interplay between the central hub/capital and other places where visitors can spend their time, in contrast with focusing all investments in just one place. Furthermore, he mentioned that Azerbaijan still has things to do in terms of improving its services, offering, and the development of its tourism ecosystem, which is much more realistic than official rhetoric usually used by the government.

It is less about the content of the latest advice and more about the fact that it aligns perfectly with an independent analysis that made similar findings even prior to the Bank’s report. Academic research on tourism recovery of Azerbaijan in post-pandemic conditions, conducted in the context of a paper written in 2026 and published in the World Journal of Tourism Management, reveals the same structural problems: the country is too dependent on a few specific source markets, has developed a capital-centric model and fails to deliver on the promises laid down in governmental strategies. The study mentions one more thing that is absent from the Bank’s roadmap, Azerbaijan has seen this movie before. In 2016, “Strategic Roadmap for the Development of the Specialised Tourism Industry” was adopted with a perspective of 2025 and featured goals that are very similar to those announced in 2023, regional diversification, better connectivity, and a larger international base of tourists.

In author’s seperate paper, on Azerbaijan’s tourism sector, examining the same World Bank findings presented in Baku, arrived at a comparable reading of where the binding constraints lie, pointing to the concentration of arrivals in three or four source markets and the Baku-first pattern of infrastructure investment as the factors most likely to determine whether the regional pivot actually happens, rather than the availability of natural or cultural assets, which the dissertation treats as largely already sufficient.

However, the areas where the Bank wishes development to take place are not homogeneous. The Azerbaijani tourism workforce is already predominantly from the countryside, and data shows that around three-quarters of the 178,000 people employed within the tourism industry are from the regions – thereby disputing the notion of a purely Baku-based industry despite tourist expenditure being predominantly in the capital. Additionally, the freed-up territories of Karabakh constitute yet another challenge and an opportunity in one: an area with tourism potential but none of the necessary infrastructure that would allow tourism to take place – roads, energy supply, accommodation facilities, etc., thus presenting a task quite unlike that of changing marketing strategies for existing regional locations.

All of this does not make the Bank’s roadmap wrong. There were indeed diversifying effects in inbound markets in Azerbaijan due to air connectivity liberalization and visa digitization in the period from 2017 until 2025, including tourists coming from India, Saudi Arabia, China, and Trkiye, which confirms that consistent policy actions do yield some effect. However, the difference between Azerbaijan’s strategic priorities in relation to the development of tourism infrastructure and its implementation is the very thing which the Bank and independent analysts in the field are trying to stress right now. It should be noted, however, that the recommendations have already been included in the new national program in relation to last-mile connectivity and subsidies for regional infrastructure. The main question is whether Azerbaijan will be able to implement it into reality and not put it aside like the roadmap formulated in 2016.