Border clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan have killed 155 infantrymen on both sides in the biggest outbreak of clashes between neighbors and long-standing adversaries in just two years, fueling fears of even greater hostilities.
Here’s a look at the decades-long standoff between the two countries and the more recent clashes.
WHAT IS IT?
Armenia and Azerbaijan have clashed for more than 3 decades in a breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The mountainous region is part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of Armenian-backed ethnic forces since the end of a separatist war in 1994.
The South Caucasus Territory covers a domain of approximately 4400 kilometers (1700 miles), approximately the length of the state of Delaware in the U. S. USA
During the Soviet era, the predominantly Armenian population region had an autonomous prestige within Azerbaijan. Long-simmering tensions between Christian Armenians and top Muslim Azeris, fueled by memories of the bloodbath of 1. 5 million Armenians through the Muslim Ottoman Turks in 1915, overflowed as the Soviet Union unraveled in its later years.
Fighting broke out in 1988 when the region made an offer to join Armenia, and after the Soviet fall of 1991, hostilities turned into a full-blown war, killing another 30,000 people and displacing around 1 million.
When the war ended with a ceasefire in 1994, the Armenian forces controlled not only Nagorno-Karabakh itself, but also giant spaces outside the borders of the territory.
International mediation efforts in the following decades resulted in a diplomatic settlement.
WAR 2020
On September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan introduced an operation called “Iron Fist” to retake Nagorno-Karabakh.
Turkey, a NATO member with close ethnic, cultural and ancient ties to Azerbaijan, has submitted its support.
In six weeks of fighting with heavy artillery, rockets and drones that killed more than 6,700 people, Azeri troops drove Armenian forces out of the spaces they controlled outside the dissident region and also seized large swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh.
A peace agreement negotiated through Russia on November 10 allowed Azerbaijan to regain the spaces occupied by Armenian forces outside Nagorno-Karabakh for nearly three decades, adding the Lachin region, which has the main road from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. Armenian forces also agreed to cede vital sections of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The deal sparked years of protests in Armenia, where the opposition denounced it as a betrayal of the country’s interests and called for the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Pashinyan resisted the pressure, protecting the deal as the only way to save Azerbaijan from seizing all of Nagorno-Karabakh.
WHAT ABOUT THE NEW HOSTILITIES?
Sporadic clashes between Azeri and Armenian forces have erupted continuously in the region, but the fighting that began on Tuesday is the most serious since the 2020 peace deal.
Both sides accused each other of starting hostilities, Armenia accused Azerbaijan of an unprovoked attack and Baku claimed to respond to the bombing through Armenian forces.
Armenia said at least 105 of its infantrymen were killed, while Azerbaijan said it lost 50.
Russia acted temporarily to help negotiate an end to hostilities, but a ceasefire it tried to negotiate was unreliable and clashes continued.
On Tuesday night, Russian President Vladimir Putin presided over a call with the leaders of countries belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Moscow-dominated organization of several ex-Soviet nations that added Armenia. organization to the shock zone.