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The fighting in the Nagorno-Karabakh region entered the sixth week on Sunday, with Armenian and Azerbaijani forces blaming each other for launching new attacks.
Nagorno Karabakh officials accused Azerbaijan of attacking the city of Martoni with military jets and several other areas with missile strikes overnight. The Nagorno-Karabakh army said Azerbaijani forces continued to bombard civilian settlements in the area in the morning.
Expressive
In turn, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry accused the Armenian forces of firing at the positions of the Azerbaijani army on the border with Armenia. The ministry also said that Armenian forces are bombing settlements in the Tatar and Agabidi regions.
Nagorno-Karabakh is located within Azerbaijan, but it has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces supported by Armenia since the end of the war there in 1994. The latest hostilities began on September 27 and left hundreds, if not thousands, of dead, the worst escalation of the conflict in decades between the two countries. The two former soviets in more than a quarter of a century.
Expressive
According to Nagorno Karabakh officials, 1,166 of its soldiers and 45 civilians were killed. Azerbaijani authorities have not disclosed their military losses, but say the fighting has killed at least 91 civilians and injured 400.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said, according to information from Moscow, that the actual death toll was much higher, approaching 5,000.
The fighting continued after three ceasefire commitments failed despite calls for peace from around the world.
In the latest attempt to defuse the tension, the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers met on Friday in Geneva for a day of talks mediated by Russia, the United States and France, and the co-chairs of the Organization’s so-called “Minsk Group”. for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which tries to mediate the conflict.
The talks ended when the two sides agreed that they “will not deliberately attack the civilian population or non-military targets in accordance with international humanitarian law,” but the agreement was quickly challenged by reports of bombing of civilian settlements.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that in order to end hostilities, Armenian forces must withdraw from Nagorno-Karabakh. He repeatedly criticized the Minsk Group for the lack of progress and insisted that Azerbaijan had the right to regain its territory by force because international mediators had failed.
On Sunday, Aliyev met with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Baku and said that if the negotiations did not ensure the withdrawal of Armenia, “we will continue to restore our territorial integrity by any means and, as I said, we will go as far as the final”.
