In Stěpanakert, at 9:30 am local time (7:30 CEST), warning sirens sounded, followed by several explosions. The Karabakh Foreign Ministry has identified “Azerbaijan Armed Forces” missiles as their originator.
The city has come under fire several times in recent days, shelling the locals forced to take refuge in cellars or shelters. On the night from Saturday to Sunday, the metropolis found itself without electricity.
Azerbaijan also blames the attacks on its own cities, according to which the neighboring cities of Terter and Horadiz and Nagnaj, the second largest city of Ganja (Gäncä) came to Nagorno-Karabakh under Armenian forces, the AFP agency wrote. Armenia rejected the attack on the city, but Karabakh forces said they had managed to destroy the military airport there.
According to the spokesperson of the Armenian Ministry of Defense, Shushan Stepanjan, the units of the unrecognized republic managed to shoot down three Azerbaijani planes and neutralize two tanks.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said Baku forces had seriously injured the leader of the unrecognized republic, Arajik Harutyunyan. He announced on Saturday that he would join his soldiers at the front and stand in the front line with them. The president also said that Baku would destroy the military posts from which Armenia was shelling Azerbaijani cities.
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The Nagorno-Karabakh dispute – an enclave in southwestern Azerbaijan with a predominantly Armenian population – has been going on for a long time between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The armed conflict erupted in 1988 during the existence of the Soviet Union, and Nagorno-Karabakh, with the support of Armenia, broke away from Azerbaijan in a bloody war that claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and resulted in hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Currently, Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent Lachin Corridor are under military control of Armenia. Azerbaijan considers the territory to be occupied.
The current conflict in the Caucasus has claimed more than 240 lives in eight days; most of them are Nagorno-Karabakh soldiers and over thirty of them are civilians on both sides. Baku does not report the losses of its army in the conflict, only the numbers of civilians killed by Armenian shelling.
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