(Reuters) -&nbsp;Azerbaijan&nbsp;said on Monday it had begun a series of&nbsp;joint&nbsp;military exercises with close ally&nbsp;Turkey, the&nbsp;first&nbsp;since&nbsp;Baku retook the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh&nbsp;last month, prompting most of the territory's ethnic Armenians to flee.
Azerbaijan's defence ministry said in a statement that up to 3,000 military personnel were participating in exercises named for the founder of modern&nbsp;Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
It said the&nbsp;drills&nbsp;were being held across&nbsp;Azerbaijan, including in Baku, the Nakhichevan exclave which borders&nbsp;Turkey, and in what the ministry called the "liberated territories" of&nbsp;Karabakh.
Turkey&nbsp;has close linguistic and cultural links to&nbsp;Azerbaijan, and offered Baku military and political support during its three decade-long conflict with Armenia, with which Ankara has no formal diplomatic relations.
Armenia and&nbsp;Azerbaijan&nbsp;have recently signalled willingness to sign a peace treaty formally ending their conflict following&nbsp;Azerbaijan's&nbsp;victory&nbsp;in&nbsp;Karabakh&nbsp;and the exodus of almost all the region's 120,000 ethnic Armenians.
The foreign ministers of the two countries, along with those of&nbsp;Turkey, Iran and Russia, were due to hold talks hosted by Tehran on Monday on progress towards a peace agreement.
However, Baku this month accused Yerevan of undermining the peace process with "aggressive rhetoric".
Armenia describes the&nbsp;Karabakh&nbsp;Armenians' flight as ethnic cleansing driven by the threat of violence after a nine-month blockade of essential supplies, the latest chapter in a conflict between Christian Armenians and Turkic Muslim Azeris that goes back more than a century.
Azerbaijan&nbsp;says the&nbsp;Karabakh&nbsp;Armenian civilians were welcome to stay and be integrated in&nbsp;Azerbaijani society, but left voluntarily.
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(Reporting by Felix Light; Editing by Gareth Jones)

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Azerbaijan holds first joint drills with Turkey since Karabakh victory