Ilham Aliyev
Ilham Aliyev inherited the presidency of Azerbaijan from his father and used the oil money to take back the territory his father had lost. Heydar Aliyev had run Soviet Azerbaijan, sat on the Politburo, and returned to power in 1993 in the middle of a war Azerbaijan was losing. By the ceasefire of 1994 Armenian forces held Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts, about a seventh of the country, and some seven hundred thousand Azerbaijanis had been displaced. He signed the contract that opened the Caspian fields to western companies and the pipeline to Turkey that carries the oil past Russia, then transferred the office to his son in 2003. The revenue transformed the state budget and the army with it. Defence spending came to exceed Armenia's entire national budget, and the purchases were Israeli and Turkish drones as much as Russian armour. In September 2020 Azerbaijan attacked and won in forty-four days, retaking most of the occupied districts in a campaign that became the standard case study in drone warfare. Three years later a one-day operation took the rest, and virtually the entire Armenian population of Karabakh left within a week. At home the arrangement is a family one. His wife is first vice-president, the constitution has been amended to remove term limits and lengthen terms, and investigative reporting on the family's offshore holdings has been met with prosecutions of the reporters. The 2018 revolution in Armenia, which the corpus narrates, brought him a counterpart with a democratic mandate and no army to match his.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: Azerbaijani
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
