It's Thursday, the 5th of March. Welcome to the PDB afternoon bulletin. I'm Mike Baker,

your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed.

First up, Iran widens the war again, this time with drone strikes in Azerbaijan.

But their strategy may be further isolating the Iranian regime and increasing regional cooperation against Tehran.

Later in the show, the latest on the thousands of Americans stranded across

the region as U.S. officials work to bring them home. But first, today's afternoon spotlight.

It's the sixth day of the war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and today we're seeing the latest

sign that Iran's strategy may be producing unintended consequences

as it continues to anger friends and neighbors in the region.

Overnight, drones believed to have originated from Iran struck the passenger terminal

of Nakhjavan International Airport that's in Azerbaijan, damaging the building and injuring civilians. Another drone reportedly

crashed near a school in a nearby village. Now, if geography wasn't your favorite subject in school,

I don't see how it couldn't have been, but here you go. Azerbaijan sits just north of Iran in the

South Caucasus. That's between Russia, Turkey, and the Caspian Sea.

Officials in that country say their monitoring systems tracked four drones coming from Iranian

territory, and President Ilham Aliyev has called the strike an act of terror. He's now ordered

the Azerbaijani military into full combat readiness and warned that retaliatory

measures are being prepared. Now, that alone would be a serious escalation, but what makes this

moment especially striking is the diplomatic whiplash it's creating. Only a day earlier,

Aliev had made a big public showing of visiting the Iranian embassy in Baku to offer

condolences following the death of supreme leader Ali Khomeini. In other words, Azerbaijan had

been trying publicly to maintain a working relationship with Tehran. And now less than 24 hours later,

...