Armenia and Azerbaijan faced off for nearly four decades of fighting for control of the Karabakh region, which was known internationally as Nagorno-Karabakh
Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev; US President Donald Trump and Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Pic/AFP
The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan are expected to sign a peace deal Friday at the White House that could potentially put an end to decades of conflict, President Donald Trump said. Trump said Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev would also be signing agreements with the US to "pursue Economic opportunities together, so we can fully unlock the potential of the South Caucasus Region."
"Many Leaders have tried to end the War, with no success, until now, thanks to TRUMP," Trump wrote on Thursday night on his Truth Social site. The prospective agreement could potentially put an end to decades of conflict and set the stage for a reopening of key transportation corridors across the South Caucasus that have been shut since the early 1990s.
Three US officials, who were not authorised to speak publicly ahead of the announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agreements included a major breakthrough establishing a key transit corridor across the region, which had been a hang-up in peace talks.
The agreement, according to the officials, would give the US leasing rights to develop the corridor and name it the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. It would link Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan region, which is separated from the rest of the country by a 32-kilometre patch of Armenia's territory.
The transit corridor is expected to eventually include a rail line, oil and gas lines, and fibre optic lines, allowing for the movement of goods and eventually people. The deal does not call for the US to pay for the construction of the transit corridor, but instead for private corporations to develop it. The deal was reached after a visit earlier this year by Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff to Azerbaijan's capital of Baku and continued talks between the parties.
Nearly four decades of bloodshed between the two
Armenia and Azerbaijan faced off for nearly four decades of fighting for control of the Karabakh region, which was known internationally as Nagorno-Karabakh.
During the Soviet era, the mostly Armenian-populated region had an autonomous status within Azerbaijan. Long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and mostly Muslim Azerbaijanis " fuelled by memories of the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Muslim Ottoman Turks " boiled over as the Soviet Union frayed in its final years.
Clashes erupted in 1988 when the region made a bid to join Armenia. As the USSR collapsed in 1991 and Armenia proclaimed independence, hostilities escalated into a full-blown war that killed an estimated 30,000 people and displaced about 1 million. When the war ended with a ceasefire in 1994, ethnic Armenian forces backed by the government in Yerevan not only took control of the region but also captured broad swaths of Azerbaijan.
Decades of international mediation efforts failed. In September 2020, Azerbaijan launched an operation to reclaim the region. NATO-member Turkey, which has close ethnic, cultural and historic bonds with Azerbaijan, gave it strong support. In six weeks of fighting involving heavy artillery, rockets and drones that killed more than 6,700 people, Azerbaijani troops drove Armenian forces from areas they controlled outside Karabakh. They also reclaimed broad chunks of Karabakh. A Russia-brokered peace deal saw the deployment of about 2,000 troops to the region as peacekeepers.
Azerbaijan then reclaimed all of Karabakh in September 2023 in a lightning military campaign. Over 100,000 people, nearly all of Nagorno-Karabakh's ethnic Armenian population, fled to Armenia in a week, fearing Azerbaijani rule. Russia, busy with its war in Ukraine, did not intervene, angering Armenia's leadership, which responded by scaling down its ties with Moscow and bolstering relations with the West.
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