Azerbaijan has recently opened a number of military intelligence courses across the country to begin training for teenagers as young as fifteen. The students will learn skills to be an intelligence offer, including weapons training and hand-to-hand combat skills. Certainly the goal to create a nation of Jason Bourne type figures is both laudable and entirely in the pink. We cannot foresee any possible negative outcomes.
Sarcasm aside this development is a scary one considering the stakes between Azerbaijan and its neighbor Armenia. Azerbaijan and Armenia have been at loggerheads since the Nagorno-Karabakh War that was waged between 1988-1994. The regional tensions were heightened by Turkey’s support of Azerbaijan in the build up to the war with Armenia. Armenia and Turkey have their own history to be overcome as well. Though the war official ended, the tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia over territorial, religious, and ethnic issues have not.
Azerbaijan has a compulsory service clause for its citizens. As nationalistic and/or anti-Armenian sentiment flares up more and more citizens look to join the military intelligence units during their mandated service time. Now this espionage and international men of mystery course will better prepare them for this goal. This program, as much as it may provoke equal and opposite measurements from Armenia and enflame anti-Azerbaijani sentiment across the border has not entered any kind of scale that should cause an alarm or new arms race. Seventy Azerbaijani men applied to the program and only twenty were accepted. Of course, if this proves to be simply a pilot program, Azerbaijan really could turn into something of a Robert Ludlum novel full of dangerous killing machines.
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