Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev praised on Thursday the active support that Turkish companies are providing his country by getting involved in many infrastructure projects as contractors in the reconstruction process in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Addressing the Extraordinary Summit of the Heads of State of the Organization of Turkic States in Ankara, Aliyev noted that, to date, Baku has signed contracts worth more than $3 billion with Turkish companies.
Aliyev also thanked Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev for the school Uzbekistan built and the creative center under construction that Kazakhstan is financing in the liberated Fuzuli district.
Within the implementation of Azerbaijan’s “Great Return” program aimed at returning previously internally displaced persons to their homelands, Baku launched large-scale reconstruction work in Karabakh and East Zangezur after their liberation of from Armenian occupation in 2020.
In its efforts to restore life in vast areas Armenia has completely destroyed, as Aliyev pointed out, Baku is building nine new cities and more than 300 villages and towns from scratch, using a rare and unprecedented model of post-conflict reconstruction financed by its own financial resources.
Per the Azeri president, the state of Azerbaijan has already invested about $4 billion in reconstruction in liberated areas and plans to allocate at least $1.7 billion this year.
As Aliyev emphasized, Azerbaijan and Türkiye have always been by each other’s side through thick and thin, underscoring the boost that Baku received from the first hours of the Second Karabakh War to its last day in 2020 through the political, diplomatic, and moral support of Türkiye and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Since the end of the war, Erdogan had visited the liberated lands – including Shusha, Fuzuli, Zangilan, and Jabrayil- three times.
He reminded that in June 2021, Türkiye and Azerbaijan signed the Shusha Declaration in the city of Shusha, in Nagorno-Karabakh, which raised the relations between the two countries to the level of an alliance.
Erdogan, who also addressed the summit on Thursday, lauded the successfully implemented large-scale projects in the field of oil, natural gas, and electricity in the Caspian basin as a result of the cooperation between the countries of the Turkic world.
He noted that they have become key players in ensuring the energy security of Europe thanks to the Southern Gas Corridor, which is based on the Trans-Anatolian natural gas pipeline (TANAP).
Per the Turkish president, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline has been delivering oil from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan to world markets for more than 16 years now.
