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Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşolu said: “Armenia is attacking Azerbaijani territories that are not under its occupation” and stressed that this aggression constitutes a war crime.
During his participation in a video call at the opening ceremony of the new academic year of the Turkish-Kazakh University of Khoja Ahmed Yesoy, Çavuşolu explained that Turkey is in a region predominantly in conflict and potential conflicts.
He added that “there are aggressive countries in the region, and Armenia’s aggression against Azerbaijan has once again demonstrated this fact.”
Çavuşolu emphasized that Azerbaijan has the legitimate right to defend its lands and people against “Armenian aggression”.
He indicated that some actors (he did not mention them) put the perpetrator and the victim on the same scale, by ignoring Azerbaijan’s exposure to injustice.
He expressed the importance of the solidarity of the sister countries with Azerbaijan, adding that Turkey has been – and will continue to be – by the side of Azerbaijan in its just struggle.
The Azerbaijani authorities revealed that 43 civilians were killed and 218 more injured as a result of missile and artillery attacks carried out by Armenia against populated areas, since the outbreak of clashes in late September, during a statement from the Azerbaijan Prosecutor’s Office, on Thursday, on the human and material losses caused by the Armenian attacks.
The statement said that the Armenian attacks caused the destruction of 1,592 houses, 79 residential buildings and 290 government buildings.
And the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry announced that its army would continue to inflict losses on Armenian forces during the clashes on Thursday night.
The ministry said in a statement that the tense situation continues in the Agadir, Agdam, Faduli, Gabriel and Hadrot regions.
He noted that the Armenian army continues to blatantly violate the humanitarian truce, launching attacks overnight in various areas, but the Azerbaijani army managed to confront them and force them to retreat, after inflicting heavy losses on them.
He noted that the Azerbaijani army managed to destroy two tanks, an anti-aircraft system, 4 Grad missile systems, 3 guns, and several drones and troop carriers of the Armenian army.
The leader of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Aryk Harutyunyan, said in a statement that Azerbaijan had managed to divert the front to deeper positions within the region.
The army in Armenia confirmed that the Azerbaijani forces managed to control more areas in Nagorno Karabakh, in the first recognition by the Armenian capital (Yerevan) of the advances made by the Azeris.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev tweeted, saying that his country’s army had liberated eight villages in the region from the control of the Armenian army.
Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan) stated that the Azerbaijani army now has control of a total of 45 cities in Nagorno Karabakh, which the Armenian army had initially denied.
Television images from Azerbaijan showed scenes of street celebrations and fireworks.
The Azerbaijani army launched an operation in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, since last September 27, in response to an Armenian attack against civilian areas, during which it managed to liberate the city of Gabriel, the town of Hadrut and more than 30 villages of the Armenian occupation.
After 30 years of Armenian occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Azerbaijanis displaced from the region have regained hope of returning to their homeland, with their country’s army liberating some areas in the occupied territories.
Most of the residents of the region believe that the current ceasefire does not represent the final solution to their cause and adhere to the need to restore the territory and all the occupied territories of Azerbaijan as soon as possible.
Armenia had disclosed hundreds of deaths since the outbreak of the conflict on September 27, while Azerbaijan previously did not reveal its victims, saying only that 43 civilians were killed.
The population of the Nagorno-Karabakh region reaches 145,000 people and is controlled by the Armenian forces, but the United Nations recognizes the region as part of the Muslim majority of Azerbaijan.
Aliyev said his country’s military offensive would continue, after he had repeatedly complained in the past that negotiations over the past three decades had not led to a peaceful solution to the conflict.
The Azerbaijani president warned Armenia of a “strong” reaction if Yerevan attacked Azeri oil and gas pipelines.
The Azerbaijani president has strengthened the army in recent years and has repeatedly threatened to take Nagorno Karabakh by force, also underlining that Turkey, an ally of Azerbaijan, will play a more important role in finding a solution to the conflict.
On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for joint efforts to end the conflict, after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Putin expressed hope that Turkey, as a member of the Minsk group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, will make “a constructive contribution to defuse the conflict.”
The Turkish president told his Russian counterpart during a phone call that he wanted to reach a “permanent solution” to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
During the telephone conversation with Putin, Erdogan blamed Armenia for “fueling the crisis” by “occupying (Azerbaijani lands) 30 years ago,” according to a statement from the Turkish presidency.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov renewed his offer to deploy peacekeepers in the region, on the condition that Baku and Yerevan accept this mission.
Aliyev said that this would be an option when Azerbaijan claims Nagorno-Karabakh, and that the new situation must be protected.
“We hope that the two sides will strictly implement the decisions,” Lavrov said after meeting with his Armenian counterpart Zurab Mnatsakyanian, according to the Interfax news agency.
The ceasefire “does not mean that all problems will be resolved quickly and at the same time,” he said, adding that it is an integrated process and that political negotiations should not be postponed any longer, emphasizing that Turkey supports this decision.
“If Azerbaijan chooses the path of using violence as a means, there will be no peaceful solution,” Manatsakyanian said after meeting with Lavrov.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu asked his counterparts David Tunujan in Yerevan and Zakir Hasanov in Baku to abide by the ceasefire agreement.
“During the talks, the Russian Defense Minister asked his counterparts to fully fulfill their obligations in accordance with the agreements reached by the two parties in Moscow on October 10,” the Russian agency “Sputnik” quoted in a statement from the Ministry of Defense. Defending.
Armed groups affiliated with Armenia launched attacks against the Nagorno-Karabakh region between 1991 and 1994, forcing hundreds of thousands of Azeris to flee the region and settle in the capital, Baku, and other cities such as Tartar, Barda (Barda), Aghdam, Aghabad, Yulakh, Goranboy, Naftalan and Minkgwer, in the west of the country.
Subsequently, the government of Azerbaijan was able to provide housing for these displaced people, who lived for years in camps due to the economic problems that the country suffered after independence in 1991.
Since 1992, Armenia occupies about 20 percent of the territories of Azerbaijan, which is the Nagorno-Karabakh region (consisting of 5 provinces), and 5 other provinces in the west of the country, as well as a large part of the provinces of Aghdam and Fuduli.
