According to local authorities, the conflict region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus was again attacked by the Azerbaijani military with rockets and artillery on Wednesday morning. Civil infrastructure objects were also hit, the Armenian news agency Armenpress reported on Wednesday. “The units of the Defense Forces are providing fierce resistance to the armed forces of Azerbaijan through defensive actions and inflicting losses on the enemy,” said the Ministry of Defense of the internationally unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh).
The former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military operation to conquer Nagorno-Karabakh on Tuesday. According to the human rights commissioner for Artsakh, Gegam Stepanyan, more than two dozen people have already been killed and more than 100 injured. Civilians and children are also among the victims. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, who has ruled under authoritarian rule since the death of his father in 2007, said in a telephone conversation with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the military operation would only end when the Armenians laid down their weapons.
Azerbaijan wants to create facts in Nagorno-Karabakh
Nagorno-Karabakh lies on Azerbaijani territory, but is inhabited by a majority of Armenians and broke away from Baku in a bloody civil war in the 1990s with the support of Yerevan. In 2020, Azerbaijan, which had been well-armed thanks to oil and gas revenues, managed to recapture large parts of the region. The ceasefire concluded after the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia is fragile despite the Russian troops deployed there to monitor it. In addition, Baku blocked Nagorno-Karabakh’s only access to the Armenian heartland for months. Observers call the humanitarian situation in the region catastrophic.
Azerbaijan’s large-scale military operation in Nagorno-Karabakh has been met with concern by the international community. According to the representation of Nagorno-Karabakh in Armenia, the regional capital Stepanakert and other cities were under “intense shelling”.
With his new attack, Azerbaijan’s head of state Ilham Aliev aims at the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh. The EU missed the moment to resolve the conflict peacefully. South Caucasus expert Stefan Meister says in an interview with star: “Azerbaijan is now creating facts”. Read the whole conversation here.