Payvand Iran News web site publishes article titled with `Iran Cultivates Closer Ties with Azerbaijan`. The article reads about the close relations between Azerbaijan and Iran, AzVision.az reports.

The article reads:

`After six years of turbulent relations between Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan, several recent trips by high-ranking Iranian officials to Baku and Azerbajani ministers to Tehran are the latest signs that the two countries want to forget bad memories and establish closer relations.

This rapprochement is in part a response to the mutual security challenges that Iran and Azerbaijan currently face, Payvand Iran News reports.

“In the wake of the nuclear agreement, numerous companies from across the world are keen to invest in Iran. It is obvious that [Iran’s] neighboring countries, including the Republic of Azerbaijan, are prioritized in this regard,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a meeting with Azeri Minister of Economy and Industry Shahin Mustafayev in Tehran on August 4.

On February 16, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, traveled to the capital of Azerbaijan to have meetings with almost all of the country’s high-level officials. President Ilham Aliyev, Speaker of National Assembly Ogtay Asadov, Prime Minister Artur Rasizade, and Foreign MInister Elmar Maddadyarov all had personal meetings with Zarif during his one-day trip.

Before Zarif’s trip, ministers of the Rouhani administration had traveled almost 20 times to Azerbaijan to reinforce security and economic ties. In November 2014, Rouhani himself traveled to Baku with a high-level delegation to hold his fourth meeting with Aliyev.

Rouhani has repeatedly said that one of his major foreign policy plans is to improve, expand, and strengthen relations between Iran and its neighbors.

Shireen Hunter, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University who follows Eurasian trends, said in an interview with Lobelog: “Despite all differences, however, the two countries have always tried not to let tensions deteriorate beyond a certain point.”

Hunter believes that Baku has reasons for improving relations with Tehran. “Azerbaijan needs Iran partly because it can only access the autonomous region of Nakhijevan through Iran. Nakhijevan itself can hardly survive without Iran. Also already caught in a conflict with Armenia, Azerbaijan cannot afford conflict with Iran, and nor can Iran. Moreover, a large number of Azeris visit Iran for medical treatment and shopping.”

Hunter argues that Salafist threats are the main reason for the recent warming trend in relations. “Azerbaijan’s economic difficulties following the drop in oil prices, the Russian-Iranian rapprochement, but perhaps more important the rise of Sunni, including Salafist, activism in Azerbaijan could move it to put relations with Iran on a more solid and lasting understanding if not actual friendship.”

Mohsen Pak Aein, the Iranian ambassador to Azerbaijan, said in an interview with KhabarOnline that the “common fight against terrorism and extremism” was one of the objectives of Zarif’s recent travel to Baku.

Iran is in a critical period. Its southern neighbors around the Persian Gulf are not much interested in expanding relations with Tehran, Iraq has been an unstable and insecure neighbor, Pakistan has never been a reliable neighbor, and relations with Turkey are distant because of the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) and the Syrian crisis. With Azerbaijan, Iran can secure close ties with a secure and strategically positioned neighbor.`

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