Death and despair reign as Armenia, Azerbaijan clash
STEPANAKERT, Nagorno- Karabakh — On the front line, the stench is overwhelming. The remains of fighters have been lying there for weeks.
In the trenches, there is fear. The Armenians are defenseless against the Azerbaijani drones that hover overhead and kill at will.
At the military graveyard, bulldozers have scraped away a hillside. It is already lined with two rows of new graves, along with soon- to- be- filled, freshly dug, rectangular holes.
The three- week- old conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over this disputed territory in the Caucasus Mountains, where Europe meets Asia, has settled into a brutal war of attrition, soldiers and civilians here on the ground said in recent days.
Azerbaijan is sacrificing columns of fighters, Armenians say, to eke out small territorial gains in the treacherous terrain of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave that is part of Azerbaijan under international law.
Civilians who have stayed behind live in their damp and unheated basements, converted in recent weeks with makeshift kitchens, and where some sleep on flattened cardboard boxes. The shelling and missile barrages into the towns in Nagorno- Karabakh and Azerbaijan have killed dozens of civilians and hundreds of soldiers and have filled the nights with terrifying flashes and booms.
In the city of Stepanakert in Nagorno- Karabakh, artillery fire can often be heard in the distance. Late Friday, the city itself came under attack. Air raid sirens and bangs and thuds sounded throughout the night, as hotel guests rushed repeatedly for the basement; at least one of the shells landed by the city center, illuminating hotel windows with a bolt of yellow light.
Manushak Titanyan, an architect in Nagorno- Karabakh, has lost one of her buildings to the violence: the House of Culture in the hilltop town of Shusha, its roof gone, a piece of it stuck in a tree across the street, the plush red seats coated in dust, the stage curtain tangled amid the rubble.
Now she fears for her three sons, the youngest of them 18, who are at the front lines. She has kept herself busy by sewing military uniforms in an emergency workshop that authorities set up in a factory in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno- Karabakh. When the building shook on a recent afternoon with the rumble of a nearby explosion, she barely skipped a beat and kept on sewing.
For the region’s populace, the war is a continuation of on- off violent strife over both territory and history, with roots going back more than a century. Armenians and Azerbaijanis lived side by side in the Soviet days, until conflict over the disputed mountain territory called Nagorno-Karabakh exploded in the late 1980s into riots, expulsions and a yearslong war.
Nagorno- Karabakh has been effectively independent since Armenia won the war in 1994, after the deaths of some 20,000 and the displacement of about a million people, mostly Azerbaijanis.
Azerbaijan launched its offensive Sept. 27 and began making small territorial gains, backed by intense artillery fire and precision drone strikes. Armenia’s limited air defenses have failed to stop the drones, but its troops, bolstered by volunteers and conscripts alike, have slowed the Azerbaijani advance. In some parts of the front, the Armenians have dug new trenches and killed large numbers of Azerbaijani soldiers attempting to advance on foot, according to Armenian accounts.
Azerbaijan, an oil and gas hub on the Caspian Sea, has deployed superior firepower, using advanced drones and artillery systems. But three weeks into the conflict, Azerbaijan has failed to convert that advantage into broad territorial gains, indicating that a long, punishing war looms.