Iranian Azerbaijanis
In the post-Soviet era, when Elchibey, his Azerbaijani Popular Front Party, and other political elites and printed media initially launched their irredentist claims toward Iranian Azerbaijan by raising ideas such as "united Azerbaijan" or "the ques tion of southern Azerbaijan," Iranian Azerbaijanis were among the first to refute the historicity of such claims, beginning their historical, political and cultural research to launch an Iranian counter-argument. Kaveh Bayat, the contemporary Iranian historical researcher, wrote the first articles on pan-Turkism. In his other works, he presented documentary analysis of the early pan-Turkist claims against Iran in Turkey of the 1920s, and showed how Iranian Azerbaijani intellectuals and activists, such as Ali Sadeghi Tabrizi, Habibollah Nobakht, Taqi Arani, Moghaddam Bayat, and Rezazadeh Shafagh, were at the forefront of the fight for the defense of the Iranian identity of Azerbaijan and the Persian language.