Armenian leader pleads for U.S. aid in conflict
When Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, spoke by telephone Thursday with President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, he raised a delicate issue: Why is nothing being done to stop a longtime U.S. ally, Turkey, from using U.S.-made F-16 jets against ethnic Armenians in a disputed mountain region?
Pashinyan’s call to the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, followed an eruption of heavy fighting in and around NagornoKarabakh, a remote territory at the center of the most enduring and venomous of the “frozen conflicts” left by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Long-disputed territory
The breakaway enclave, legally part of Azerbaijan but controlled by Armenians for the past three decades, has seen many military flare-ups over the years. But the current fighting, Pashinyan said in a telephone interview, has taken on a far more dangerous dimension because of Turkey’s direct military intervention in support of Azerbaijan, its ethnic Turkic ally.
On Sunday, news reports said, the forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, ex
changed rocket fire, with missiles falling on Azerbaijan’s second largest city, Ganja, and on the Armenian-controlled capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. Each side accused the other of targeting civilians while denying carrying out any attacks itself on residential areas.
In a statement Sunday,
the International Committee of the Red Cross denounced “a surge in attacks using heavy explosive weaponry on populated areas,” which it said “is taking a deadly toll on civilians.” It said that hundreds of homes as well as schools and hospitals had been destroyed or damaged, forcing families to flee or re
treat “underground to unheated basements, sheltering day and night from the violence.”
The conflict has set off alarms about the risks of a wider war and put the United States, with its large and politically influential Armenian diaspora, in the uncomfortable position of watching Turkey, a vital
NATO ally, deploying F-16 jets in support of Armenia’s enemies.
“The United States,” Pashinyan said, “needs to explain whether it gave those F-16s to bomb peaceful villages and peaceful populations.” He said that O’Brien had “heard and acknowledged” his concerns and promised to set up a phone conversation between the Armenian leader and Trump.
That opportunity to rally the United States to Armenia’s side vanished just a few hours later when Trump announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
U.S. disengagement
But Trump’s health issues, analysts say, have only accentuated his administration’s disengagement from a conflict that offers no easy diplomatic victories. It has confounded decades of efforts to resolve a dispute that has left Armenians in control of not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also large swaths of Azerbaijani territory outside the breakaway enclave.
Pashinyan declined to say whether Armenia might be ready to surrender any occupied Azerbaijani land as part of a possible peace settlement, insisting that this was not up to him but a matter for the leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, a nominally independent entity ruled by ethnic Armenians.
Turkey said Sunday that Azerbaijani forces had retaken Jabrail, the latest in a series of villages previously occupied by Armenia now said to be back under Azerbaijani control as a result of fighting over the past week. The claim could not be independently confirmed.