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In what may be a further sign of the newly cozy relations between Moscow and Baku, a Yaroslavl court has given the green light to the extradition to Azerbaijan of a former National Security Ministry official from Azerbaijan's exclave of Naxcivan who had sought asylum in Russia, the article on RFE/RL reads.

The article presents interview with Ibragim Musayev given to the news portal Kavkaz-Uzel.ru, where Musayev describes his recruitment by Azerbaijan's National Security Ministry and how he ran a network of agents who supplied information on developments in the northwestern regions of Iran.

He also recalls how an airport technician, Turac Zeynalov, told him about a consignment of arms transported by air from Baku to Naxcivan and destined for the PKK, which was then still mired in a decades-old armed conflict with Azerbaijan's strategic partner, Turkey. Zeynalov said he had seen in a car placed at his disposal by the drunken army officer accompanying the arms shipment papers, which he scanned, detailing the type and quantity of weaponry and the intended recipient. Zeynalov gave Musayev copies of those papers on August 2, 2011; on August 24, he was arrested and charged with espionage. He was killed by MNS.

“The documentary evidence Musayev claims to have obtained from Zeynalov of Azerbaijani government involvement in supplying weaponry to the PKK serves yet again to highlight Azerbaijan's seemingly ambivalent relationship with that organization,” the article reads.

The author reads that unsubstantiated allegations of links between the Azerbaijani leadership and the PKK, and/or of the presence of PKK members or even training camps on Azerbaijani territory, appeared regularly in the Azerbaijani opposition press in the early 2000s. Among the officials named in this connection were senior members of the Sumgait municipal council and Baylar Eyyubov, who headed then-President Heydar Aliyev's personal security service.

Visiting Baku in early 2003, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, expressed concern that PKK members were operating in Azerbaijan under the guise of cultural programs.

The article tells the opposition parliament deputies have demanded on at least three occasions since 2002 that the parliament formally designates the PKK a terrorist organization, but the ruling Yeni Azerbaycan Party consistently blocked a debate on the issue. The most recent effort, in December 2009, was spearheaded by Camil Hasanli, who was selected last month by the opposition National Council of Democratic Forces as its reserve candidate for the October 9 presidential election. On that occasion, parliament speaker Oktay Asadov responded that once the Turkish parliament declares the PKK a terrorist organization, Azerbaijan will follow suit.

In the context of the purported shipments of weaponry to the PKK via Naxcivan, Musayev notes that many Kurds occupy senior government posts in that autonomous republic or own banks, construction companies, and hotels there. He points out that the chairman of the republic's parliament, Vasif Talybov, is himself a Kurd.

“Finally, it should be noted that some Azerbaijani politicians have publicly suggested that Heydar Aliyev was a Kurd. That belief was based partly on his physical appearance, and partly on newspaper reports identifying his elder brother Hasan as the first Kurd in Soviet Azerbaijan to embark on postgraduate study and defend his dissertation,” the author writes.

At the same time, as Thomas de Waal noted in his obituary of the late president, Heydar Aliyev was also said to have been instrumental as a young KGB officer in creating the PKK, presumably with the intention of undermining stability in NATO-member Turkey.

Prominent members of Azerbaijan's Kurdish minority, according to a Moscow blogger quoted by veteran analyst Paul Goble, include the mayor of Baku and the head of the state oil company SOCAR. That blogger estimated the number of Kurds in Azerbaijan at 150,000, compared with the official figure of 70,000.

“Which figure is closer to the truth is impossible to say, given that the Kurds have not been listed as a separate ethnic group in Azerbaijan since the 1959 Soviet census,” the material says.