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The National Interest has published an article on Turkey's demographic policy employed in nearby regions and the possibility to move it to the South Causes following the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Author Michael Rubin writes that the large number of Syrian refugees held in Turkey remains tragedy for others, while Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees opportunity in it.

"Erdogn’s top authorities offer Sunni Syrian Arabs an opportunity both to avoid refugee camps and to gain the privileges of Turkish citizenship so long as they settle either in predominantly Alevi areas in Hatay or in Kurdish towns and villages in southeastern Turkey. In both cases, Erdogan’s goals are simple: utilize Sunni Islamists to dilute minority populations or tip the balance in close-held districts to his own party," the author reads.

He insists that Erdogan and his ally Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev try to replicate the strategy in Nagorno-Karabakh, referring to documented presence of thousands of Syrian mercenaries deployed in Karabakh in the months before the September 27 outbreak of fighting.It notes that the Syrian mercenaries—at least those who survived the fighting—have remained in Azerbaijan.

"In Karabakh, those returning from the front suggest that Syrian mercenaries are both sending for their family members to come to Azerbaijan and seeking to then settle in southern areas of Karabakh that have now reverted to Azerbaijan. While Erdogan and Aliyev might celebrate ridding the region of Christians, replacing them with mercenaries will be a ticking time bomb for the southern Caucasus. They not only will create tension within majority Shi’ite Azerbaijan, but if they try to link up with jihadists in the northern Caucasus, they could both destabilize the region and trigger greater Russian intervention in the region," the author writes.