US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called Monday evening for an end to hostilities between the two enemy countries.
Armenia and Azerbaijan on Tuesday (September 13th) reported large-scale border clashes that left Azerbaijani troops dead. “Tuesday at 12:05 a.m. (20:05 GMT), Azerbaijan launched an intensive bombardment, with artillery and large-caliber firearms, against Armenian military positions in the direction of the cities of Goris, Sotk and Jermuk”, the Armenian Defense Ministry said. He said in a statement that Azerbaijan also used drones.
For its part, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense accused Armenia of“large-scale subversive acts” near Dashkesan, Kelbajar and Lachin districts on the border, adding that the positions of his army “came under fire, in particular from trench mortars”. “There are casualties among the military (Azerbaijani)»he reported, without giving numbers.
The United States who said to themselves “extremely worried” regarding these reported attacks, urged on Monday, through their Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, an immediate cessation of fighting.
Two wars, in the 1990s and in 2020
Frequent shootings have been reported along the border shared by the two enemy countries since the end of the 2020 war between Yerevan and Baku, over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Last week, Armenia accused Azerbaijan of killing one of its soldiers in a border shootout. In August, Baku said it lost one soldier, and the Karabakh army said two of its soldiers were killed and more than a dozen injured. The neighbors fought two wars – in the 1990s and in 2020 – in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani enclave populated by Armenians.
Six weeks of fighting in the fall of 2020 left more than 6,500 dead and ended in a Russian-brokered ceasefire. As part of the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades and Moscow deployed some 2,000 Russian peacekeepers to oversee the fragile truce. During EU-mediated talks in Brussels in May and April, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan agreed to “move the talks forward” on a future peace treaty.
Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflict claimed an estimated 30,000 lives.