And so one of the other reasons why they always kept Azerbaijan close, but not too close. So there was, again, the contentious relationship, but still there and friendly as it was, was because they feared the separatism among the Azerbaijani population. For those that don't know, there are approximately 15 to 20 million Armenians inside of Iran are from Azerbaijan or they're ethnically Azerbaijani.
And so they always had this fear that a strong nationalistic Azerbaijan on the other side of the border could inspire the separatist sentiment inside of Iran and cause some of that friction to happen. And so that's one of the other reasons why it was a good relationship, but it wasn't the best relationship and it was hard and bad at times as well. I want to go to Saad real quick, and then I'll come back to you, Arsene.
Yes, hi. Good evening. Thank you for letting me speak.
First of all, thank you for your feed, for your coverage and your input. I've been following it for a while. And to give you a quick background by myself, I used to work as a journalist covering the Iraq War, 2003 to 2010.
And then I moved to the States and worked for the State Department as a counterterrorism messaging analyst for the State Department for a while. And now I'm a freelance. And I've been listening to lots of what you have been saying tonight.
And I just want to highlight some stuff that I'm personally involved in and I've seen firsthand. For example, you just talked about MEK, about the potential of using them and using their military capabilities. Unfortunately, they don't have any anymore.
