Residential area bombing kills 12 in Azerbaijan’s second-largest city | World

Journalists from the AFP news agency saw a building destroyed by the missile. Around 3 a.m., neighbors fled the area crying, some in pajamas.

“We were sleeping. The children were watching television,” Rubaba Zhafarova, 65, said in front of her destroyed house. “All the surrounding houses have been destroyed. Many people are under the rubble. Some are dead.”

• UNDERSTAND: The confrontations between Armenia and Azerbaijan involve a long-standing territorial dispute in the Caucasus; know more

Dozens of rescuers worked at the scene looking for survivors. According to neighbors, more than 20 people lived in the affected area. A neighbor said he saw a child, two women and four men being pulled out of the rubble.

Hikmat Hajiyev, an adviser to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, said on Twitter that “according to initial information, more than 20 houses have been destroyed.”

An Azerbaijani official said a second missile hit an industrial zone in Ganja at the same time, but gave no details. The city, of more than 300,000 inhabitants, was hit last Sunday by another missile, which left 10 dead.

AFP journalists in Mingecevir, an hour from Ganja, said they heard an explosion that shook real estate around the same time. The city is protected by an anti-missile system as it houses a strategic dam. It was not known whether the missiles were destroyed mid-flight or hit the city.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry limited itself to reporting that Mingecevir was the target of an attack, without giving details.

Clashes in Nagorno-Karbakh

Saturday’s attack is another episode of violence after the escalation of tension between the two countries over the dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist region that is located in Azerbaijan but has an ethnic Armenian majority.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a territory populated mainly by Armenians. The region declared its independence from Azerbaijan shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union. This movement unleashed a war that caused 30,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees from both sides in the 1990s.

Since then, Baku has accused Armenia of occupying its territory and armed clashes are recurrent.

The current clashes have been the most serious since 1994. After almost 30 years of diplomatic stalemate, Azerbaijani President Ilham Alyev promised to regain control of this territory, even by force, if necessary.

Countries blame each other for this year’s conflicts, which have already caused more than 600 deaths.