Word: azerbaijan
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...with the Soviets, Senator Henry Jackson recalled last week-and it involved another Iran crisis. In 1946 the Soviets and British agreed to end their World War II occupation of Iran, but the Soviets reneged. They increased their forces and set up autonomous regimes in the northwestern provinces of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. In a little-known episode of nuclear diplomacy that Jackson said he had heard from Harry Truman, the President summoned Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko to the White House. Truman told Gromyko that Soviet troops should evacuate Iran within 48 hours-or the U.S. would use the new superbomb...
...rivalry between the army and the Pasdaran has not deterred the revolutionary regime from its aim of setting up an independent force whose loyalty is beyond question. Pasdaran units were flown to Tabriz from Tehran last month to quell unrest in Azerbaijan. At last count, the Pasdaran numbered about 20,000, or roughly two-thirds of its planned total strength...
...Azerbaijan may seem a remote corner of the world, but this was once the land of the all-powerful Medes, the birthplace of Zoroaster, and from its capital of Tabriz the Mongol Khans ruled an empire that stretched from Egypt to Cathay. Though a disastrous series of earthquakes leveled every trace of Tabriz's great palaces, the region's ethnic Turks remain a driving force in Iran. Not only do they represent more than a third of the population (5 million in Azerbaijan, 8 million more in the rest of the country), but they are the nation...
...civil war will take place." He gave Khomeini an uncommonly aggressive lecture about insisting that the West was responsible for the uprising. Said Sharietmadari: "Everything that happens in this country should not be blamed on 'international Zionism and imperialism.' The legitimate demands of the people of Azerbaijan should not be dismissed...
...tensions in Azerbaijan can only further stir Iran's other jostling eth nic minorities-the Kurds in adjoining Kurdistan, the Arabs near the Persian Gulf, the Baluchis and the Turkomans to the east. Last week there even came a brief incursion by the Iraqis across their disputed frontier. The Kurds are most likely to cause trouble next. These flinty, well-armed peasants, isolated in their mountain hideaways, have in the past fought more fiercely for independence than Iran's other dissident minorities, and a cease-fire agreement that they signed last month with the Khomeini government just expired...