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President Ilham Aliyev's first official visit to fraternal Turkey after the election once again shows the importance of strategic partnership between the two countries, MP Hikmat Babaoglu told Trend on April 26.

"Describing the Azerbaijan-Turkey relations, the president said these relations have an ancient history and a recent history," Babaoglu reminded. "One can for surely say that if our ancestors built the ancient period of this history, and in the first years of our independence, the relations between the two countries were built by outstanding political figure Heydar Aliyev, then the qualitatively new Turkish-Azerbaijani relations in the newest political history were built by Ilham Aliyev."

According to Babaoglu, under the current complex system of international relations, the Turkish-Azerbaijani relations act as a balancing factor in the region and create an important platform for cooperation of all regional countries, excluding Armenia.

"Therefore, the ties between the two countries should be considered not only as bilateral relations, but as the relations creating very useful prospects for the future of the entire region," Babaoglu said.

He emphasized that strategically important projects, such as Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum, Baku-Tbilisi-Kars, realized upon Azerbaijan's initiative, has turned Turkey into an important infrastructure corridor.

Babaoglu said that fraternal Turkey, using important energy and transport projects, has become a transit country, and also received revenues from these projects.

"Azerbaijan invested $14 billion in Turkey's economy, while Turkey invested $12 billion in Azerbaijan's economy. Turkey is the second largest trade and economic partner after Russia for friendly and fraternal Azerbaijan," the MP reminded.

He stressed that this important success creates new prospects.

"All these issues stipulate closer cooperation and deeper integration. Therefore, all these issues were discussed in detail at the seventh meeting of the Azerbaijan-Turkey High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council. Several documents, which cover very broad areas from the socio-economic to the scientific, cultural and even military-strategic, were inked at the meeting," he said.

"President Ilham Aliyev noted that today Turkey is a world power and has a developed defense industry," the MP reminded.

"Therefore, agreements on military cooperation and production of defense products were signed between the two countries. All this is of great importance for Azerbaijan's military-strategic security," the MP said.

Babaoglu went on to add that Azerbaijan and Turkey jointly fight against terrorism to ensure their security.

"President Aliyev, touching upon this issue, said that anti-terrorist Operation Olive Branch, successfully carried out by Turkey, was a common issue. In fact, if numerous terrorists were not eliminated during this operation, one could not rule out that terrors would be committed in our country through terrorist Armenia. Furthermore, Turkey is the country that supports Azerbaijan most of all in settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and has always sincerely stood by our country. All these and many other issues require jointly ensuring the security of the two countries," Babaoglu added.

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