Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is expected to make his first overseas trip after winning a fifth reelection this month to Türkiye next week, Turkish diplomatic sources said, per a Turkic tradition.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will host Aliyev on Monday and his Albanian counterpart Edi Rama on Tuesday in Ankara, sources said.
Aliyev, who has been Azerbaijan's president since 2003, was reelected for a fifth term in office on Feb. 7 with over 92% of the vote.
"The Turkic world is our family," Aliyev told his inauguration ceremony in the capital, Baku. "We must make a joint effort for the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) to become a key global actor and power center. We can achieve this only together."
The OTS is a group of prominent Turkic nations working together for political solidarity and economic cooperation, including Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, with Hungary, Turkmenistan and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) holding observer status.
Aliyev intends to reinforce the message of unity with the said visit, sources added. He and Erdoğan will discuss Türkiye-Azerbaijan relations, regional and global issues, as well as Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Erdoğan, too, made his first overseas trips after his victory in last May's presidential and parliamentary elections to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and Azerbaijan.
Having upgraded relations to the level of strategic partnership with the 2021 Shusha Declaration, Ankara and Baku have hailed recent years as a "historic peak" in their relations, with sturdy cooperation deals in almost all fields, from politics to trade and military to defense.
Turkish backing was also significant for Azerbaijan in the Second Karabakh War in 2020 when Baku liberated the border territory from three decades of illegal Armenian occupation in 44 days of clashes that ended with a Russian-brokered peace agreement and opened the door to normalization with its archrival Armenia.
Baku established full constitutional order in Karabakh after a lightning September offensive against the last Armenian separatists in the region, who laid down arms and surrendered.
Aliyev's landslide election win has been attributed to his victory in the liberated territory.
