Armed clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops in the Nagorno-Karabakh region spilled beyond the borders of the disputed region on Sunday.
Hikmet Hajiyev, an aide to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, said that the Armenian military bombarded Azerbaijan’s second largest city, Ganja, with heavy artillery and rockets, killing one person and wounding 32 others. The Armenian military also targeted the industrial city of Mingachevir and other smaller towns, Hajiyev added.
Hajiyev’s claim was denied by the Armenian military, but Arayik Harutyunyan, the leader of the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, said in a Facebook post that his troops targeted military facilities in Ganja before he ordered them to stop further operations to avoid accidentally killing civilians. Arutyunyan warned that his troops would begin targeting other major cities in Azerbaijan and urged their residents to evacuate immediately.
Authorities in the region, which seeks to secede from Azerbaijan, have warned that a “final battle” has begun in the region. They called on the international community on Saturday to “recognize the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh” as “the only effective mechanism for restoring peace.
A day before the attacks on the towns of Ganja and Mingechaur, Armenia said that Stepanakert, the capital of the disputed region, had been targeted by Azerbaijani forces. Dozens of people were killed and hundreds wounded in the fighting that broke out a week ago Sunday.
Armenian and Azerbaijani forces have ignored calls from the United States, France and Russia for an immediate cease-fire in the Nagorno-Karabakh region over the past week, escalating the fighting to its highest level since the 1990s. The three countries co-chair the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) Minsk Group, which is tasked with finding a peaceful solution.
Azerbaijani President Aliyev has demanded that Armenia withdraw its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh as the only way to end the fighting.
The disputed region, which is predominantly Armenian, was formerly an autonomous region within Azerbaijan that declared independence from Azerbaijan during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, sparking a war immediately afterwards. The war claimed the lives of up to 30,000 people before a ceasefire was declared in 1994.
The Minsk Group’s efforts to broker peace in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict failed in 2010.
Recent Comments