The transnational political firestorm over Azerbaijan’s school hijab ban has produced an extraordinary spat between the governments of Azerbaijan and Turkey, culminating in lurid allegations of Turkish coup-plotting in Azerbaijani state-backed media. These two states have proclaimed themselves the closest of allies—“two states, one nation,” as the popular saying goes. Yet their strong bilateral ties are relatively recent and widely misunderstood. The two countries’ intimacy has created increasing friction as Azerbaijani leaders realize that Turkey’s governing elite view Azerbaijan as less than a co-equal sovereign state.
The current round of tensions began on Sept. 21, when the Azerbaijani government approved a more restrictive protocol on school uniforms that effectively banned students from wearing the hijab in the country’s state schools. Two days later, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party (AKP) ended Turkey’s own headscarf ban, condemned headscarf bans—without naming Azerbaijan specifically—as an attack on women’s fundamental freedoms during his speech to the U.N. General Assembly.
The transnational political firestorm over Azerbaijan’s school hijab ban has produced an extraordinary spat between the governments of Azerbaijan and Turkey, culminating in lurid allegations of Turkish coup-plotting in Azerbaijani state-backed media. These two states have proclaimed themselves the closest of allies—“two states, one nation,” as the popular saying goes. Yet their strong bilateral ties are relatively recent and widely misunderstood. The two countries’ intimacy has created increasing friction as Azerbaijani leaders realize that Turkey’s governing elite view Azerbaijan as less than a co-equal sovereign state.
The current round of tensions began on Sept. 21, when the Azerbaijani government approved a more restrictive protocol on school uniforms that effectively banned students from wearing the hijab in the country’s state schools. Two days later, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party (AKP) ended Turkey’s own headscarf ban, condemned headscarf bans—without naming Azerbaijan specifically—as an attack on women’s fundamental freedoms during his speech to the U.N. General Assembly.
Within Azerbaijan, rare unsanctioned demonstrations took place following the order’s implementation on Oct. 12. While arrests and internet restrictions curtailed them, small protests, bringing together both religious people and secular left-liberals, have continued.
At the same time, what began as veiled barbs and grumbling from Turkey’s ruling AKP has now burst into a stream of condemnation. On Oct. 12, Oktay Saral, chief advisor to Erdogan, and Leyla Sahin Usta, a deputy parliamentary leader for the AKP, expressed their outrage over the Azerbaijani policy in posts on X. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Erdogan themselves have made passive-aggressive comments while stopping short of any explicit criticism.
But the rift goes beyond the hijab. Notably, the recent tensions coincided with Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s state visit to Baku. Azerbaijan’s close relationship with Israel, long a subject of discomfort for Turkey, has become a more salient issue amid Ankara’s own rapidly deteriorating relationship with the country. Israel has given Azerbaijan military equipment and surveillance technology. Azerbaijan has allegedly provided Israel with a crucial forward base for operations into Iran. This summer, the Israeli Knesset dropped a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide—intended as a jab at Turkey—over Azerbaijani objections.
At a deeper level, there is also a fundamental disagreement about sovereignty. Erdogan and his allies imagine Turkey as a leading power in a world increasingly divided into quasi-imperial spheres of influence. In such a worldview, there’s no way for two states to maintain relations without hierarchy. Azerbaijan, though ruled by a glitzy petro-oligarch nomenklatura, is poorer than Turkey, and its population is roughly the same size as that of the European side of Istanbul.
The Azerbaijani government and its supporters present their country as a rising, independent middle power capable of balancing between difficult, larger neighbors. Growing self-confidence and a hunger for strategic autonomy among leaders in both Baku and Ankara lie squarely behind the clash over the hijab ban. Ironically, in this regard, it is Azerbaijan’s similarity to Turkey that has created strain between the two countries.
Despite the intense rhetoric of brotherhood and unity that could be heard from both countries in recent years, Turkish-Azerbaijani ties were not always so close. In March 1995, an Azerbaijani colonel launched a coup attempt against Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev with the active involvement of Turkish citizens, allegedly including pan-Turkist elements within the Turkish security establishment. These pan-Turkists, as well as their ideological allies in Azerbaijan, were apparently unhappy that the former Communist Party leader Aliyev had himself risen to power in the wake of the coup that deposed President Abulfaz Elchibey, a charismatic radical nationalist intellectual. Turkey’s then-President Suleyman Demirel tipped off Aliyev to the plot, but the incident nonetheless did damage to the two countries’ bilateral relationship.
Changes in Turkey and the region would help bring the two countries closer. In 2003, Heydar Aliyev died and his son, Ilham, assumed the presidency. Azerbaijan was at peace and increasingly prosperous. A pipeline, finished in 2006, brought Azerbaijani oil from the Caspian Sea fields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the eastern Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Erdogan, who took power in Turkey in 2003, was fighting his own battle against coup plotters and marginalizing members of the pan-Turkist movement.
By the time that the Azerbaijani army made its decisive move on Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijani and Turkish leaders were eager to forget their complicated past. Azerbaijan’s 2020 victory over Armenians in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War brought Azerbaijan and Turkey together as never before. The euphoria of that event was embodied in the victory parade of Dec. 10, 2020, which featured both Ilham Aliyev and Erdogan at the rostrum surrounded by Azerbaijani and Turkish flags.
Behind the public fanfare, though, unease remained. In private, Aliyev was wary of the growing power of Turkish Islamists. According to cables published by WikiLeaks, Aliyev stated to U.S. officials in 2009 that he had banished Turkish soap operas from Azerbaijani television broadcasts to avoid promoting women wearing headscarves. In 2015, Erdogan also began his own reconciliation with his country’s pan-Turkists, who eventually grew into some of his closest allies.
In 2021, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Education blocked an effort by pan-Turkists to build a school in Shusha, a city formerly controlled by Armenians. They were presumably wary of inviting the same pan-Turkist Idealist Hearths organization that participated in the 1995 coup attempt into the highly securitized and symbolically significant city.
Credit for the 2020 victory also became a touchy subject. In the summer of 2024, Erdogan stated, “as we entered Karabakh and Libya, we’ll do similarly to them,” referring to Israel. This prompted a scolding in Azerbaijan’s official state-owned gazette, which rejected the notion that Turkish or any other foreign soldiers had participated in Azerbaijani campaigns.
In early October, Aliyev suggested obliquely that foreign arms suppliers had engaged in profiteering in their dealings in Azerbaijan. Turkish firms, which prominently supplied drones and weapons to Azerbaijan in the buildup to the 2020 war, had just struck the latest of many deals to sell arms to Baku.
Azerbaijan occupies an ambiguous and increasingly uncomfortable space within expanding Turkish regional ambitions. Erdogan has typically made his first post-election international trips to Azerbaijan and northern Cyprus. Turks often refer to northern Cyprus as yavru vatan, or baby homeland—an outpost of the motherland that must be nurtured and defended. An AKP official tasked with relations with the Turkic world addressed conflict with Azerbaijan by stating, “we know how to discuss our problems within our own family setting—in a manner that befits us.”
As the Azerbaijani government is likely realizing, these family analogies are loaded. The internationally unrecognized Turkish Republic of North Cyprus is largely dependent on and subservient to Turkey. Last year, the Turkish Cypriot government tried unsuccessfully to lift a hijab ban to appease Ankara. Saral, the same Erdogan advisor who criticized Azerbaijan’s ban, responded to the effort’s failure by insulting the Turkish Cypriot prime minister.
In contrast to their effective domination of northern Cyprus, Turks have long shown meaningful deference to Baku on key issues of mutual concern. Turkish normalization with Armenia has been slow-walked for almost two decades out of Ankara’s respect for Azerbaijani sensitivities. Responding to the public break, higher-level figures in the Turkish government have also tried to assuage Baku. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in a press conference that any differences would be resolved respectfully. Devlet Bahceli, Erdogan’s coalition partner, was even more deferential, calling for dialogue between “two strong states” that “span the same geography of the heart.”
Still, Turkey’s AKP elite have long been a better gauge for the direction of Turkish policy than government officials such as Fidan or political allies such as Bahceli. Baku clearly understands this and is increasingly worried by those elites’ unwavering ambition to make Turkey the predominant power in their shared region. The ruling New Azerbaijan Party’s response to Saral and Usta is instructive. Its statement addressed the hijab ban issue almost as an afterthought, instead focusing on defending Azerbaijan’s position on Israel-Palestine and attacking Turkish “hegemonic tendencies” in the Islamic world.
Azerbaijan’s state-controlled media was far less measured. One article, deleted shortly after it was posted, accused Fidan, who is also the former head of Turkish intelligence, of giving secret instructions to a Turkish nongovernmental organization during his visit to Baku. It accused Fidan and other Turks of “plans to interfere in internal affairs,” “intelligence operations,” “coup and chaos plans,” and “recruiting agents of influence,” and it invoked Turkish involvement in the 1995 coup attempt. The Turkish Embassy in Baku sternly condemned these allegations.
An outlet linked to SOCAR, the Azerbaijani state oil company, chimed in to protest Turkish “attempts to turn brotherhood into a tool of economic pressure” and objected that “Azerbaijan is not a vassal state” and would not accept Turkish “‘big brother’ dictates.” Other recent posts in state-aligned media have charged that Turks historically sought to establish an Armenian state at Azerbaijan’s expense and that AKP’s foreign policy is an existential threat to the national identity of the states comprising the “Turkic world.”
The hijab ban protests are hardly the work of an invisible Turkish hand, but Aliyev is right to worry about Turkish ambitions to shape his country’s future. One of Heydar Aliyev’s achievements was fortifying his authoritarian state against the designs of Iran, Russia, and Turkey. Ilham Aliyev appears to have things under control for the moment, but he is undoubtedly worried about any potential complications, particularly as he begins promoting his only son, the 29-year-old Heydar Ilhamoglu Aliyev, as a would-be successor. The sensational allegations of Turkish plotting against Azerbaijan, which follow an alleged pro-Russian coup attempt last year, reflect the profound insecurity of Azerbaijan’s rulers, who perceive manifold threats to their power from home and abroad.
The Azerbaijan-Turkey alliance will almost certainly survive this crisis—their economies and societies are now so deeply intertwined that a deeper break is difficult to imagine. The Azerbaijani government has recently insisted that more of the weapons that it buys be built in Azerbaijan, and that they will continue to fortify their country against alleged foreign interference. It remains to be seen how Turkey will respond to Azerbaijan’s decision to issue international arrest warrants for seven Turkish nationals, among them several Islamist commentators. The Turkish Constitution forbids the extradition of citizens outside of its obligations to the International Criminal Court.
This this may well lead to Baku unwinding Turkish cultural and religious influence and promoting secular “Azerbaijanism” as an alternative to Islamic conservatism and pan-Turkism. However events unfold, expect more bickering and frustration between these brotherly Turkic states.