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KOMPAS.com – The war between Azerbaijan against Armenia has been developing since Sunday (9/27/2020) in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The two countries accuse each other of being the ones who started the war.
So far, more than 100 deaths have been confirmed among Armenian civilians and troops.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has not released any data on the deaths on its part.
What is the area of Nagorono-Karabakh that the two countries are fighting for?
Also read: Azerbaijan claims to have killed and wounded 2,300 Armenian soldiers in Nagorno-Karabakh
Geographical
Nagorno-Karabakh is an autonomous region founded by the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
Despite being on the border of Azerbaijan, 95 percent of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh is ethnic Armenians.
The area now covers an area of approximately 2,700 square miles or 4,400 square kilometers.
Quoted from British, The Nagorno-Karabakh region covers the northeastern side of the Karabakh Mountains and extends from the mountain top line to the banks of the Kura River lowlands.
The characteristics of the area vary, from steppes (grasslands without trees) to dense forests.
Vineyards and mulberry orchards are products that are intensely developed in the area.
Nagorno-Karabakh also has several food and snack processing industries, with the city of Xankandi being the main industrial center.
Also read: Azerbaijan and Armenia reject negotiations amid escalating conflict
Geopolitics
Under the rule of the Soviet Union, this region quietly developed.
Although there were occasional battles between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, this was still under control.
Quotation Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Wednesday (09/30/2020), the conflict escalated in 1988, when the Nagorno-Karabakh legislative body passed a resolution to join Armenia.
The demand was strongly rejected by Azerbaijan and the Soviet Union.
The dispute between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis has been intensified by this problem, especially when the two countries gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The war between the two countries was inevitable until 30,000 lives were claimed and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee.
In 1993, Armenia managed to seize Nagorno-Karabakh and occupy 20 percent of the territory of neighboring Azerbaijan.
A year later, Russia and the Minsk Group negotiated the conflict between the two countries and imposed a ceasefire in 1994.
The Minsk Group is a committee formed in 1994 to handle disputes and is co-chaired by the United States, Russia, and France.
They organize meetings between the leaders of the two countries and hold individual meetings. The group had successfully negotiated a ceasefire, but territorial issues were still as difficult to resolve as before.
However, since the violence and ceasefire violations in 2016 that killed 200 people, efforts to negotiate and mediate have always hit a dead end.
Also read: On the second day of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, 95 people died