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Baku, Azerbaijan): Armenia Y Azerbaijan He said that heavy fighting continues in their conflict over the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh territory. Azerbaijan’s president said on Saturday night that his troops had taken a city and several villages, while Armenian officials claimed that his troops caused heavy casualties.
Clashes broke out on September 27 in the region, which is within Azerbaijan and under the control of local ethnic Armenian forces. It is one of the worst in Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding areas since the end of a war in 1994.
Armenian Defense Ministry spokeswoman Shushan Stepanian said on Saturday “heavy fighting was taking place along the entire front line” and that Armenian forces had shot down three planes.
The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry denied that planes were shot down and said that Armenian personnel had bombed civilian territory. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said his country’s army “raised the flag” in the city of Madagiz and seized seven villages.
Nagorno-Karabakh officials have said that more than 150 military personnel on their side have been killed so far. Azerbaijani authorities have not given details on their military casualties, but said 19 civilians were killed and 55 more injured.
Vahram Poghosyan, spokesman for the President of Nagorno-Karabakh, said on Saturday Facebook that intelligence data showed that some 3,000 Azerbaijanis had been killed in the fighting. Armenian Defense Ministry spokesman Artsrun Ovannisian later said 2,300 Azerbaijani soldiers were killed, about 400 of them in the last day.
With Azerbaijan not commenting on troop losses, the statements could not be verified.
Nagorno-Karabakh was a designated autonomous region within Azerbaijan during the Soviet era. He claimed the independence of Azerbaijan in 1991, about three months before the Soviet Unioncollapse. A large-scale war that broke out in 1992 killed some 30,000 people.
When the war ended in 1994, Armenian forces seized not only Nagorno-Karabakh, but substantial areas outside the territory’s formal borders, including Madagiz, the village that Azerbaijan claimed to have seized on Saturday.
Several resolutions of the United Nations Security Council have called for the withdrawal of these areas, which the Armenian forces have ignored.
Aliyev said in a television interview that Armenians must withdraw from those areas before the latest fighting stops.
In the interview with Al Jazeera, whose transcript was distributed on Saturday by the presidential press office, Aliyev criticized the so-called Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has tried to mediate a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.
One of the reasons behind the current fight is that “the mediators do not insist or exert pressure to start implementing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council,” he said.
“We don’t have time to wait another 30 years. The conflict must be resolved now, ”Aliyev said.
Armenia has repeatedly claimed over the past week that Turkey sent Syrian fighters to Azerbaijan and that the Turkish army is assisting Azerbaijan.
“Turkey and Azerbaijan are not only pursuing political-military objectives,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said in a speech to his nation on Saturday. “His objective is Armenia, his objective is the continuation of the genocide of the Armenians.”
Approximately 1.5 million Armenians were killed in mass killings in Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1915, which Armenia and many other countries have termed genocide. Turkey firmly rejects that term, maintains that the total number of victims is inflated and says that the deaths were the result of the civil war.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Saturday alleging that thousands of ethnic Armenians from abroad are being deployed or recruited to fight for Armenia.
“Armenia and the Armenian dispossession organizations bear international legal responsibility for organizing these terrorist activities,” the statement said.
