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850 Syrian mercenaries are supposed to support Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh
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Azerbaijani armed forces attack an Armenian camp in Nagorno-Karabakh (image published by the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry)
Quelle: dpa / Uncredited
The conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region could take on a whole new dimension. There are growing signs that Syria’s Islamist terrorist fighters are making a living there as mercenaries. During the night there should have been a full-scale pincer attack.
men the bloody conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, international concerns are growing about a conflagration in the southern Caucasus involving Islamist terrorists from Syria and Libya. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 28 Syrian Turkish fighters were killed in the fighting. They were among a total of around 850 fighters Ankara had sent to the region to support Azerbaijani troops.
He and French President Emmanuel Macron both pointed to the danger from Syrian fighters, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said after a phone call between the two politicians. Pashinyan had accused Turkey of having relocated thousands of mercenaries from war zones in Syria and Libya to the southern Caucasus. Russia also announced that it had plausible evidence.
According to information from Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed his concern about this fact in a telephone conversation with his Iranian colleague Mohammed Jawad Zarif. Iran is a neighbor of Armenia and Azerbaijan and has offered to mediate in the conflict. Russia has called on the parties to the conflict to immediately withdraw fighters from illegal terrorist groups from the Middle East. If these fighters were true, the decades-long conflict would have a new dimension. There was no strong evidence of the use of mercenaries.
The official mediation body between the two former Soviet republics at war is the so-called Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The group called for an immediate end to the fighting and a return to the negotiating table. Previously, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, Macron and the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, had issued a joint statement calling for the observance of the ceasefire and dialogue. While Armenia was open to negotiations, Azerbaijan refused.
Azerbaijan wants to “snatch” Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh
With the support of Turkey, Azerbaijan stressed several times that it wanted to take the area from Armenia. The oil and gas rich country has improved significantly in recent years and is militarily superior to the completely impoverished Armenia. Azerbaijani President Ilcham Aliyev had threatened to take back the area militarily if necessary. He criticized that the years of negotiations had not brought progress for his country.
Source: WORLD infographic
Armenia has been complaining about heavy artillery shelling of Azerbaijan for about a week and more than 200 deaths in its own ranks and in Nagorno-Karabakh. The capital, Stepanakert, in Nagorno-Karabakh, was also hit by rockets on Friday. Homes and infrastructure were destroyed. One person was killed and eleven other residents were injured, authorities said.
View of a residential building that was damaged in recent clashes between the Azerbaijani armed forces and the Armenian army
Source: dpa / David Ghahramanyan
On Saturday, the Yerevan government spoke of a large-scale pincer attack on Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijani troops had advanced “with strong units” from both the north and south, the Russian agency Tass reported, citing the command of the Armenian army. The information could not be confirmed by an independent party.
Decades of conflict are coming to a head
The Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, regretted that the fight continued after the call of France, the United States and Russia. He called on the parties to the conflict to immediately end all hostilities so that human suffering in the region did not worsen further. The conflict cannot be resolved militarily, but only through dialogue.
The two former Soviet republics have been fighting for decades over the mountainous region, which is home to some 145,000 people. Armenia controls Nagorno-Karabakh, but under international law it belongs to Islamic Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan lost control of the area in a war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union some 30 years ago. Now it is inhabited by Armenian Christians from Karabakh. Since 1994 there has been a fragile ceasefire. Turkey is on the side of Azerbaijan in the conflict, while Armenia sees Russia as a protective power.
