According to Al Jazeera television, Azerbaijan said on Saturday that 13 civilians, including two small children, were injured and 40 others were injured in the night Armenian shelling of the city of Ganja by scud rockets fired from Armenia and not Nagorno-Karabakh.
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Local authorities said that in the second largest city in Azerbaijan, missiles hit two places five kilometers apart and hit 20 residential houses. According to a Reuters photographer, some buildings are almost level. The city was hit by rockets six days ago.
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Search teams in the ruins of affected buildings in Gjanja
Photo: Umit Bektas, Reuters
The Armenian Ministry of Defense denied the allegations, and instead complained that the inhabited villages in Nagorno-Karabakh, including the metropolis of Stepanakert, were shelled again on Friday evening. The attacks claimed civilian injuries.
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The Armenian Ministry of Defense added that Armenian troops and separatist units from the internationally unrecognized Republic of Arcach in Nagorno-Karabakh “are ready to comply with the terms of the humanitarian ceasefire agreement signed in Moscow on October 10 and to implement agreed measures to monitor the ceasefire.”
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The inhabitants of Stepanakert remove debris.
Foto: Stringer, Reuters
The current struggles are the fiercest since the 1990s. The Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh – an enclave in southwestern Azerbaijan with a predominantly Armenian population – has been going on for decades. Armed conflict broke out in 1988 during the Soviet era. Nagorno-Karabakh, with the support of Armenia, broke away from Azerbaijan in a bloody war that has claimed an estimated 35,000 deaths and more than a million refugees. At present, Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent Lachin Corridor and other areas are under the military control of Armenia. Azerbaijan considers this territory to be occupied.
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