Ceasefire declared in Nagorno conflict
Azerbaijan says 16 of its servicemen killed
baku/yerevan — Azerbaijan and its breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh said they had halted hostilities on Tuesday after four days of intense fighting that had prompted fears of all-out war.
Reuters was not able independently to verify whether the fighting - a resurgence of a decades-old conflict over the status of the region - had, in fact, stopped.
But an official in the breakaway region’s Armenian-backed administration said the ceasefire was being observed. “Along the entire line of the front there is a relative lull,” the official, Davit Babayan,said.
Several European countries had urged an end to the fighting, worried that an escalation could cause instability in a region that serves as a corridor for pipelines taking oil and gas to world markets.
The fighting has been the bloodiest in years, with Azerbaijan saying 16 of its servicemen had been killed in the previous 48 hours. Officials in the breakaway region said 20 of their soldiers had been killed since the fighting started.
The ex-Soviet states of Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a war over the mountainous territory in the early 1990s in which thousands were killed on both sides and hundreds of thousands displaced.
The war ended with a truce in 1994, although there have been sporadic flare-ups since. The ceasefire was shattered over the weekend, with the two sides exchanging heavy fire using artillery, tanks, rocket systems and helicopters.
Azerbaijan’s defence ministry issued a statement saying: “On April 5 at 12noon (0800 GMT), on the basis of a mutual agreement, military actions on the contact line between the armed forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan are halted.”
An official with the Armenianbacked armed forces of Nagorno-Karabakh told Reuters: “We’ve been ordered to halt fire.” As late as Tuesday morning, before the ceasefire was announced, both sides had been reporting fresh clashes.
An all-out war over Nagorno-Karabakh could drag in the big regional powers, Russia and Turkey. Moscow has a defence alliance with Armenia, while Ankara backs its ethnic Turkic kin in Azerbaijan.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Tuesday condemned what he said were Armenian attacks, and said Turkey would stand by Azerbaijan. Earlier, Russia’s foreign minister had said Ankara’s support for Baku was one-sided.
Nagorno-Karabakh is an enclave with a large ethnic Armenian population that lies inside the territory of Azerbaijan. The violence was a re-awakening of a long-festering ethnic conflict between the mainly Muslim Azeris and their Christian Armenian neighbours. —