Iran Police Disperse Pro-Azerbaijan Demonstrations

Iranian police are dispersing protests [Getty]

Police dispersed demonstrations in northwestern Iran in support of Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the Fars news agency reported.

Protests broke out on Thursday in Tabriz, the capital of Iran's East Azerbaijan province, where a large Azeri minority lives, wrote Fars which also published two videos showing dozens of people gathered in streets chanting slogans in the Azeri language.

In one video, there appeared to be a deployment of police, according to AFP.

In Tabriz, "around 500 people gathered and chanted slogans in support of the end of the occupation of Karabakh", an Armenian separatist enclave within Azerbaijan, Fars said.

"Some tried to disrupt the atmosphere with ethnic slogans (but) the police intervened to stop the rally," the agency added.

"Some people" were arrested by "security forces" in Zanjan for having chanted "ethnocentric slogans", Fars noted, without providing further details.

According to some estimates, there are around 10 million Azeris out of Iran's population of 80 million, which also includes an Armenian community of just under 100,000.

Clashes have raged between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces since Sunday over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian province that broke away from Baku in a bitterly fought war in the early 1990s that claimed 30,000 lives.

According to AFP, the clashes, the worst since 2016, have raised fears of a new war between the two countries.