Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, his late father and predecessor Heydar Aliyev and some of their closest political allies hail from Nakhchivan.

The name of this tiny, mountainous and underdeveloped Azeri area sandwiched between Armenia, Iran and Turkiye sounds unfamiliar to those outside the strategic South Caucasus region.

But Nakhchivan’s name and geopolitical significance resurfaced after United States President Donald Trump hosted a White House summit between Azeri and Armenian leaders on Friday.

Azerbaijan’s Aliyev and the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a preliminary peace deal to end the decades-long conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

In the early 1990s, ethnic Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region broke away from oil-rich Azerbaijan after a war that killed th

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