If he continues, the 50-year-old Lebanese of Armenian descent says he’s ready to drop everything and volunteer to defend his ancestral land.
Some members of Lebanon’s large Armenian population have already traveled to join the fight, according to community members, though they say the number is small.
The new eruption of violence in the Caucasus region hits Lebanese Armenians close to home. Red, blue and orange Armenian flags fly from balconies, windows and roofs of buildings in Bourj Hammoud, Beirut’s main Armenian district.
Anti-Turkish graffiti in English and Armenian marks the walls of the streets.
Fighting has raged since September 27 in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh region, leaving several hundred dead. The enclave is within Azerbaijan, but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by neighboring Armenia since 1994, when a truce ended a years-long war that killed some 30,000 people.
On the other side of the latest fighting, Turkey has sent hundreds of Syrian opposition fighters to back up its ally Azerbaijan, according to a Syrian war monitor and three Syria-based opposition activists.
Lebanese Armenians have been sending money and aid, as well as campaigning in the media in support of ethnic Armenians in the enclave, referred to as Artsakh. The support they can provide is limited: Lebanon is experiencing a severe economic crisis and banks have imposed strict capital controls.
Lebanon is home to one of the largest Armenian communities in the world, most of them descended from survivors of the 1915 genocide by the Ottoman Turks.
An estimated 1.5 million died in massacres, deportations, and forced marches that began in 1915 when Ottoman officials were concerned that Christian Armenians would side with Russia, their enemy in World War I.
The event is widely viewed by historians as genocide. Turkey denies that the killings constituted genocide, saying the death toll has ballooned and the dead were victims of civil war and riots.
“We will not allow what happened in 1915 to happen again. We will fight to the last Armenian soldier,” Ghazarian said, standing next to a coffee stand decorated with Lebanese and Armenian flags.
“This is not a war between Muslims and Christians. It is a war for the existence of the Armenian entity and we are ready,” said Ghazarian, owner of a clothing store.
Lebanese lawmaker Hagop Pakradounian, who heads the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the largest and most powerful Armenian party in Lebanon, said that volunteers going from Lebanon to Armenia act on their own and that no organization or the community itself decides to send them.
“We cannot tell them not to go. They are free,” Pakradounian told The Associated Press at his office in Bourj Hammoud. “We consider it to be a war against the entire Armenian people and a continuation of the genocide project from the Ottoman Empire.”
Meanwhile, Turkey has sent more than 1,200 Syrian fighters, most of them members of Turkish-backed opposition groups, to fight alongside Azeri forces, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor from opposition war tracing Syria’s nine years. conflict. The head of the Observatory, Rami Abdurrahman, said 72 Syrian fighters have so far been killed.
Three opposition activists in Syria corroborated the report. They said the men are apparently recruited by Turkish security companies to work as guards at oil facilities in exchange for about $ 1,200 a month, but most end up on the front lines. One of the activists sent the AP photos of young men allegedly killed in Azerbaijan.
A citizen journalist based in northern Syria said he knows some of the fighters who joined the battle, adding that the warnings they sent about the intensity of the fighting and the dangers caused others planning to leave to change their minds. .
The deployment is similar to what happened in Libya, where battle-hardened Syrian fighters helped tip the balance of power in favor of the UN-backed government of Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj, an ally of Turkey.
Armenia has repeatedly said over the past week that Turkey sent Syrian fighters to back the Azeris, a claim that Ankara and Azerbaijan deny.
Syrian President Bashar Assad told Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency that Turkey is bringing “terrorists” from Syria and Libya to fight in Azerbaijan, accusing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of being “behind the escalation in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
French President Emmanuel Macron spoke with Russia’s Vladimir Putin about the conflict last week. Later, Macron told reporters that he had information “that we trust” to confirm the deployment of Syrian mercenaries by Turkey in the fighting.
“It is a very serious new development that also changes the balance of things,” he said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry expressed concern over reports of the dispatch of “militants of illegal armed groups” from Syria and Libya to the conflict zone.
Hikmet Hajiyev, a foreign policy aide to the Azerbaijani president, said this week that “we completely reject” the claim, and asked those making the accusations to give testimony.
.
