If Iran had not assisted Azerbaijan, Armenians would have captured Baku as well – former Iranian military
“If Iran had not assisted Azerbaijan, Armenians would have captured Baku as well,” Foreign high-ranking military of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Mansour Haghighatpour said in an interview with the Iranian news agency Azariha.org.
As the source notes, during the Artsakh war, Mansour Haghighatpour was the military advisor of former Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev.
Asked what assistance Iran provided to Azerbaijan in the period of the Artsakh war, the former military said: “We saved the Azerbaijani people, otherwise the Armenians would even take Baku. Until now, Azerbaijan has $30 million debt owing to Iran; however Iran is generous and has never raised the issue. If Turkey were in our case, it either would demand the money, or exploited the issue and gained ten times more profit.”
Mansour Haghighatpour went on adding: “The Azerbaijani officials are ungrateful. In case Iran had not provided a plane full of weapons to Rovshan Javadov through my assistance, Armenians would have captured other territories as well. In those days we were training 6500 soldiers in Baku, its residents would confirm it.”
To note, in one of its interviews, Mansour Haghighatpour noted that during the Artsakh war, due to the direct efforts of one of dead Azeri commanders Rovshan Javadov, more than 2000 Afghan militants were brought to Azerbaijan to fight against Armenians.