The war in Iran has quickly spiralled from a localized confrontation into a conflict that has drawn in nearly the entire Middle East.

Since the joint U.S.-Israeli decapitation strike that killed Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, Iran has launched missiles and drones against nearly all of its neighbours. 

Its primary target has been the Arab Gulf states — Qatar, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have regularly been pummelled by Iranian salvos. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated promises that the conflict is drawing to a close, no end is yet in sight.

There is one neighbouring region that has so far managed to mostly avoid becoming a party to the conflict: the South Caucasus. But there are signs it might not avoid it forever. 

Armenia and Azerbaijan, both of which border Iran to its north, have seen their fair share of conflict. The two fought a pair of major wars in the past three and a half decades, first in 1991-94 and more recently in 2020. 

In 2023, Nagorno-Karabakh — the disputed region at the heart of the conflict — was reconquered by Azerbaijan, sending more than 100,000 refugees fleeing into Armenia.

Azerbaijani troops still hold positions in Armenian territory above the mountain town of Jermuk, highlighting the current ceasefire’s fragility. (Neil Hauer/CBC)

The two countries have since reached an unlikely, and tenuous, calm. At Trump’s invitation, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev initialled an accord in Washington last August aimed at ending the long-running conflict. For the first time in years, the regular cross-border shootouts between the two have stopped.

Risks of Iran war

The war now unfolding along their shared southern border risks undoing this tenuous calm — and inflicting both economic and physical damage.

"There are all kinds of risks to Armenia [from the Iran war]," said Tigran Grigoryan, head of the Yerevan-based Regional Centre for Democracy and Security. "Iran and Armenia have a gas-swap deal, which is likely to be disrupted. Armenia’s trade with the Gulf states and China also largely flows through Bandar Abbas, in south Iran."

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Armenia is also a clear destination for refugee flows from Iran, particularly with regards to Iran’s own ethnic Armenian population, which numbers perhaps 80,000. Some of them, along with other Iranians, have already made the journey — a small amount to date, but one that's continually growing.

Reza, a 40-year old animator from Tehran, is one of them.

"I came to Armenia on March 15," he said. "It was impossible to stay in Iran any longer."

CBC has agreed to withhold Reza’s last name out of concern for the safety of his family in Iran.

Living and working in Iran had already become nearly impossible following the country’s government-imposed internet blackouts — something that first occurred during the January crackdown, in which Iranian security forces killed as many as 30,000 protesters. A full blackout has been in force again since Feb. 28.

Reza says he and his family fear the Iranian regime far more than the current U.S.-Israeli bombardment.

"Every time the bombs start to fall, we would go out to the rooftops to see what they hit," he said. "We are happy to see them, because we know the government is under attack, not civilians. I don’t know one person that was killed by the bombs, but I know so many people — even my family members — that were killed by the regime in January."

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When Reza decided to flee, Armenia was an obvious choice.

"Armenia is the easiest place for Iranians to go to," he said. "I have friends here because I visited two years ago, and everyone is very welcoming. Not many people have left [Iran], though. Most people think that either the war will end soon or that the regime will fall."

A complicated relationship

While Armenia is somewhat insulated from the conflict, Azerbaijan is a different story.

Azerbaijan and Iran have a complicated relationship. Azerbaijan is close allies with Israel, to whom it exports oil and gas while buying billions of dollars of Israeli military equipment. There is widespread speculation that the capital, Baku, allows Israel to use its territory for intelligence-gathering against Iran, a claim Tehran regularly makes.

The recently established Iranian consulate in the southern Armenian city of Kapan is meant in part to deter potential Azerbaijani aggression. (Neil Hauer/CBC)

This relationship has led to growing antagonism as Israeli airstrikes on Iran continue.

"It is clear that in the past, Israel used the territory of Azerbaijan for intelligence [gathering] against Iran," said Altay Goyushov, research fellow at the Baku Research Institute. "So it would be surprising if Israel did not do so during this war."

Azerbaijan is meanwhile trying to balance relations with its other key partner: Turkey, a major opponent of Israel that is pressuring Baku to stay out of the war.

"Turkey is effectively testing whether Aliyev is more loyal to [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan or to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu," Goyushov said. "It’s possible that Turkey demands that Aliyev scale back assistance to Israel to avoid irritating Iran."

Earlier this month, it looked as though Azerbaijan might be drawn into the conflict regardless. On March 6, Iran bombed an airport in Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhchivan, causing Aliyev to place Azerbaijan’s armed forces on their highest level of readiness. 

Tensions have since subsided, but further escalation of the conflict will likely pose more threats.

One obvious target, should Iran decide to expand its campaign of striking regional energy infrastructure, is Azerbaijan’s critical oil and gas fields.

"These fields provide more than 90 per cent of the state’s foreign revenues, and they are connected to Western companies," Goyushov said. "The pattern shows that Iran primarily targets Western-linked assets, and these [fields] are vulnerable."

'I am not going back to Iran'

Any potential unravelling of the Iranian government, meanwhile, carries the risk of a potential reignition of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. While Iran’s direct role in the South Caucasus has been limited in recent decades, it still provides a crucial counterweight to Turkey, which has often backed Azerbaijan in its territorial ambitions regarding Armenia.

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"Iran has played an important role when Azerbaijan has aggressively pushed its policy of coercive diplomacy towards Armenia," Grigoryan said. "Iran has repeatedly sent signals, via holding military drills, that any Azerbaijani action to seize Armenian territory was unacceptable. The collapse of Iran as a unified state could change this."

For the time being, such a collapse still looks unlikely. Reza, for one, doesn’t believe it is imminent. In fact, he doesn’t expect to see his home country anytime soon.

"I am not going back to Iran," he said. "The Islamic Republic is not going to fall, as much as we might like it to. And there is no future under this bloody regime."