WASHINGTON — Azerbaijan has launched an unusual campaign to win influence among U.S. lawmakers, teaming up with a Turkish guru in exile and the sister of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, as it seeks to translate its immense oil wealth into political support.

Since early 2013, state legislators in 17 states have introduced resolutions or memorials relating to the former Soviet Republic. Most are general statements of support or recognition of the 1992 Khojaly massacre, one of the most violent and controversial incidents in Azerbaijan’s war with neighboring Armenia.

What the initiatives had in common was they nearly all had at least one sponsor who attended a conference in the capital Baku in May 2013 organized by the Turquoise Council for Americans and Eurasians. The council is a Houston-based group connected to Fethullah Gulen, the leader of the moderate Islamist Hizmet movement who fled Turkey in 1999 after clashing with secular Turkish authorities who accused him of trying to turn Turkey into a religious Islamist state.

The initiatives — brought in Utah, New Mexico, Tennessee, Kansas, South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Illinois, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Hawaii — play well domestically in Azerbaijan, a country run by a regime accused of corruption and widespread human rights abuses, even if not all of them were passed.

The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has so far mostly avoided the international scrutiny and criticism afforded to similar human rights abusers. This month, the country assumed the chairmanship of the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe, Europe’s leading human rights body, amid a renewed crackdown on opposition activists. Last month alone it sentenced eight youth activists to six to eight years in prison and is currently trying five people who criticized the government on Facebook, according to Human Rights Watch.

In an effort to improve this image, Azerbaijan has become one of the top 10 foreign spenders on lobbying in the United States, spending $2.3 million last year, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

Azerbaijan lobbies in the U.S. through three main conduits: its embassy; a fairly new group called the Azerbaijan America Alliance; and its state oil company SOCAR, which has opened an office in Washington.

The Azerbaijan America Alliance, which helped finance a Flight 93 memorial in Pennsylvania in 2013, is run by Anar Mammadov, the son of Azerbaijan’s Transport Minister Ziya Mammadov. He is perhaps best known for once allegedly paying a restaurant in the Gabala region of Azerbaijan $1 million to slaughter and grill a bear for him.

Experts say these organizations are often the work of the offspring of the Azeri elite. “There is a phenomenon of the children of oligarchs acting as lobbyists abroad,” said Tom de Waal, a South Caucasus expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“They have these very posh gala dinners,” said one Azerbaijan expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Alliance is “one way that [Mammadov] is making his family more important to the regime.”

Then there is SOCAR, which has hired the Washington firm Roberti + White and is listed as a partner in the Houston groups that have done much of the outreach to state legislators. The May trip to Baku, which also included members of Congress and former Obama administration officials, appears to have been key. A report by the only U.S. journalist to attend the trip (whose visit was also paid for) said lawmakers “jostled for pictures” in Azerbaijan’s parliament, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Azerbaijan’s ruling party, went sightseeing in Baku, “showered their hosts with praise” at a visit to a university, and were interviewed relentlessly by Azerbaijani TV reporters. The trip’s attendees reportedly each received a “hand-woven Azeri carpet, an executive briefcase and a set of Czech-made tea glasses.” Several of them spoke at the conference that culminated the trip, as did David Plouffe and Robert Gibbs, former top Obama administration officials, and Jim Messina, President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager.

Sometimes the link between the Azeris and the resolutions was even more direct. In Tennessee, Representative Joe Towns, who was invited to attend the 2013 trips, introduced an Azerbaijan-related bill this year. Local media noticed that he had received $10,000 in campaign donations from a a handful of people in Houston, Texas who are members of the Azeri and Turkish communities there. Towns denied that the contributions had inspired him to write the resolution.

The Turquoise Council, headed by a Gulenist follower named Kemal Oksuz, paid for the travel of lawmakers who went on the trip, according to congressional records. Oksuz also chairs the Assembly for the Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ), a Houston group sponsored by SOCAR, which hosted a U.S.-Azerbaijan convention in Washington at the end of April attended by many of the same lawmakers who went on the trip to Baku, as well as other members of Congress and former administration officials. The Assembly’s vice president is Milla Perry Jones, the sister of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and its treasurer is Rauf Mammadov, the chief of SOCAR’s U.S. branch. Oksuz also owned TDM Contracting, a construction firm in Texas that worked to build a network of Gulenist charter schools there. (Reached by phone, Jones said her position with AFAZ was “ceremonial” and unpaid and that she had become involved with the group after traveling to Azerbaijan. Jones said she had “no idea” who is a member of the organization.)

Oksuz has has donated directly to several of the members involved in the trip as well as other politicians and party committees. Oksuz denied there was any anything improper in his relationship with Towns or any other lawmaker. He told BuzzFeed that the Turquoise Council organizes trips to Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan to provide an opportunity to “meet there with the government officials, civic society leaders, U.S. Embassy staff, and people from public” and “get briefing about the relations. So that they learn more about the country and its relations with the U.S.”