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In the last two days, I am seeing Azerbaijan is effectively using drones against Armenia.

Which country made these drones?

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  • Voting not to close - Since there is no Military.SE, I think we should give some latitude to such questions here on Po.SE as who supplies what weaponry to which country is indeed a very political decision and highly relevant in international relations. Moreover, this is a question on current event and can be answered factually as the current answers already point out.
    – sfxedit
    Commented Oct 7, 2023 at 14:47

3 Answers 3

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Israel apparently. Which references Drone Databook.

Let’s start with what we know. The most recent edition of the Drone Databook that was compiled by Bard College’s Center for the Study of the Drone says Azerbaijan has eight different types of drones, all acquired from Israel. These include the Aerostar, Orbiter 1K and Orbiter 3 from Aeronautics.

FWIW, Israel pretty much invented battlefield UAVs as we know them, 20-30 yrs ago. There had been others, before, but they were either target drones or prohibitively expensive.

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There's no official information yet about what drones have been used in operations in the recent days. However,

There are reports from June:

Azerbaijan is planning to acquire scores of Turkish-made armed drones, the Azeri defense minister has said.

In July, Azerbaijan and Turkey conducted large military drills. It is not a secret that quite often, some equipment to stay in the host country after joint military drills end.

Additionally, Turkey's new battle tactics has proven extremely successful against Russia-made air defense systems and armored vehicles that Armenian army is equipped with. So it would be no surprise if Azerbaijan is interested.

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There's a long read by Oryx:

no less than 135 artillery pieces were destroyed by Bayraktar TB2 UAVs alone (out of more than 245 artillery pieces confirmed to have been lost by Armenia in total). [...] Bayraktar TB2 drones (which are visually confirmed to have destroyed at least 88 T-72 tanks), loitering munitions (responsible for the destruction of a minimum of thirteen tanks)

So yeah, although Azerbaijan had [nominally] acquired an undisclosed number of TB2s only a few months before, their contribution to the 2020 war was quite substantial. (Perhaps what happened then in terms of timeline mirrored later developments, when e.g. Akinici pilots already completed training [on it] before that drone was officially announced among future purchases. OTOH Armenia more directly accused Turkish pilots of flying combat missions against them on the TB2s.)

As for the "loitering munitions", that refers mostly to the Israeli Harop (later on Aliyev even took a photo-op with one at a show), but they also had some SkyStrikers. A number of these loitering munitions were used to destroy Armenian air defenses [typically before the TB2s went into a particular area], although the TB2 itself proved hard to hit by the rather outdated systems that Armenia had. (Nonetheless, some TB2s were downed and an analysis of their components resulted in some Canadian sanctions.)

BTW, war is matter of quantity too. Azerbaijan used Israeli (Harop) drones in combat as early as 2016, but back then they probably didn't have enough for a decisive operation.

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