By Richard Silverstein

AP reports that Israel’s leading aerospace contractor has inked a $1.6-billion deal to supply Azerbaijan with drones, missiles, and other advanced military hardware, which would be used to arm a potential frontline state in the war against Iran. Israel has used such arms deals to create intimate military and intelligence links with nations as varied as Georgia, Russia and India.

Sheera Frenkel also reported recently on Azerbaijan as a Wild West outpost. It plays a major role in the war of nerves among Iran, Israel and the west. She interviews a Mossad agent who has served years there and only set foot in the Israeli embassy once. She tells of a country riddled with spy networks working one or both sides of the street. The officials of the government seem to be available to the highest bidder. It’s a bit like a central American or Caribbean country packed with corrupt drug dealers using the country for trans-shipments of drugs and guns. Except that in Azerbaijan the drug dealers are spooks and assassins.

Iran accuses the country of being a safe harbor for the Mossad/MEK conspirators who’ve been knocking off Iran’s nuclear scientists. Though there are many Iranian Azeris living on both sides of the border, there seems little love lost among these two neighbors. Brotherly relations have become corrupted by money, power, oil and arms.

It is especially the sort of place where one side or the other will decide to make an example of Azerbaijan for its collusion with the other. If not a plot to bomb the Israeli embassy then some other suitably gory plan. Baku would be a perfect Sarajevo as a catalyst for regional war, just as the latter city was a site for the assassination that initiated World War I. the Azeris and their willing foreign co-conspirators are playing with fire and it’s only a matter of time before the conflagration breaks out with a vengeance.

This article appeared at Tikun Okan