Kurdamir’s military history is, for most of its length, the history of one Soviet unit. The 976th Fighter Aviation Regiment was formed in August 1942 and was at Khrabrovo near Königsberg in 1945. According to the unit history compiled by the reference site ww2.dk, it moved to Yevlakh in the Azerbaijan SSR in January 1946 and on to Kyurdamir, as Russian sources spell it, in 1953. It became an air defence (PVO) regiment in January 1950, part of the Soviet air defence system in the south.

At Kurdamir it flew, in turn, the MiG-15 (in service with the regiment since 1951), the MiG-17 from 1953, the Su-9 interceptor from September 1960 and the Su-15 from June 1973. Then its whole purpose changed. On 15 December 1981 it became a fighter-bomber regiment and from July 1982 flew the Su-17M; on 1 December 1989 it became the 976th Bomber Aviation Regiment and converted to the Su-24M. English Wikipedia, citing the Russian reference work of Feskov and colleagues, places it in the 34th Air Army of the Transcaucasus with Su-24s and Su-17s in the late 1980s, alongside the Su-25s at Sitalchay and the reconnaissance jets at Dallar.

The dates are the unit historians’; no Azerbaijani official source for the Soviet period was found.

The break-up of the Soviet air forces in Azerbaijan was uneven, and Kurdamir came out of it empty. The ww2.dk history records the 976th regiment at Kyurdamir until June 1992 and then at Totskoye in Russia’s Orenburg region, where it became a training regiment and was disbanded on 1 May 1998. At Nasosnaya, by contrast, the MiG-25 interceptors of the 82nd regiment stayed behind, and at Sitalchay Azerbaijani troops took the Su-25 regiment with its aircraft.

Kurdamir was nevertheless back in use within months, as Azerbaijan fought the first Nagorno-Karabakh war with whatever it could inherit or buy. English Wikipedia, citing Yefim Gordon’s history of the MiG-21, says Azerbaijan inherited none of the type but acquired about a dozen, probably from Ukraine, that some were based at Kyurdamir, and that at least one was lost to ground fire over Karabakh. The overall loss figures for that war are contested and are covered on the air force page.

By 2004, according to Jane’s Sentinel as cited by English Wikipedia, Kurdamir held a bomber aviation regiment with Su-17s, Su-24s, Su-25s, MiG-21s and L-29 and L-39 trainers, a mix that shows how the air force pooled its Soviet leftovers at a few bases. Jane’s added in 2009 that the units at Nasosnaya, Kurdamir and Baku Kala appeared to be numbered the 408th, 411th and 843rd. The Azerbaijani government has not published its own order of battle.

The Azerbaijani defence ministry rarely names air bases, and much of what is known about Kurdamir since 2010 comes from incidents. In early February 2011 RFE/RL reported that a Su-25 had crashed in the Kurdamir region during training and that its two-man crew had ejected safely, according to the ministry spokesman Teymur Abdullayev; English Wikipedia gives the date as 3 February and the type as a two-seat Su-25UB.

On 12 September 2016 the state news agency AZERTAC reported an open day at an Air Forces military unit in Kurdamir District, at which visitors were shown the soldiers’ quarters and anti-aircraft weapons; Colonel Namiq Islamzade spoke as garrison commander. Islamzade, promoted major general in December 2020 and named a Hero of the Patriotic War, has commanded the Air Forces since September 2024, according to English Wikipedia.

In the summer of 2020 Kurdamir was one of five places named by the ministry for the joint Azerbaijani–Turkish air and land exercises of 29 July to 10 August. During the war that followed, the ministry said on 22 October 2020 that a ballistic missile had been fired from Armenia towards the Kurdamir region at about 09:00, alongside others towards Qabala and Siyazan, and that no one was hurt; Armenia denied firing them. The ministry now reports JF-17, Su-25ML and L-39 training flights without saying where they fly from, and this page does not guess.