Azerbaijan vows revenge after shelling kills civilians
▶ Armenian forces deny involvement in attack that hit city near Nagorno-Karabakh
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said his forces would strike back against Armenia after shelling hit his country’s second largest city, killing at least 12 civilians and injuring dozens more.
In televised remarks broadcast hours after yesterday’s early- morning shelling of a residential area of Ganja, Mr Aliyev said Azerbaijan’s army would “take revenge on the battlefield”.
“They [Armenia] will be held responsible for that ... if the international community does not punish Armenia, we will do it,” he said.
The Azeri Prosecutor General’s office said about 20 apartment buildings in Ganja were hit by missile strikes.
Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said two minors were among the dead.
Ganja is close to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, which has been the focus of bitter fighting since September between its ethnic-Armenian inhabitants and Azerbaijani forces.
Azerbaijan’s foreign affairs ministry suggested in a post on Twitter that Armenia was responsible for yesterday’s shelling. Armenian Defence Ministry spokeswoman Shushan Stepanyan denied Armenian involvement.
Azerbaijan and Armenia continued to accuse each other yesterday of carrying out attacks that breached a weekold, Russian-brokered truce.
The fighting is the worst in the region since Azerbaijan and ethnic- Armenian forces went to war in the 1990s over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous territory that is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but populated and governed by ethnic Armenians.
Mr Aliyev said the Azeri army
took two regions that were previously held by ethnic Armenians – Fizuli and Jabrail.
“We are dominating the battlefield,” he said, adding that his forces never targeted civilian settlements despite civilians fleeing shelling of residential areas of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Mr Aliyev also questioned Ar
menia’s ability to keep replacing military hardware destroyed in battles, a thinly veiled jab at Yerevan’s ally, Moscow.
He repeated his position that Baku would stop its offensive only when Armenia withdrew from Nagorno-Karabakh.
In Ganja, rescuers worked at the scene yesterday morning, picking through rubble. Some houses had been almost levelled. An excavator was clearing the debris.
“We have been living in fear for days ... we are suffering a lot,” one resident of the city, Emina Aliyeva, 58, said. “We would rather die. I wish we were dead but our children would survive.”
Denying involvement, the Armenian Ministry of Defence claimed that Azerbaijan was continuing to shell populated areas inside Nagorno- Karabakh, including Stepanakert, the region’s biggest city.
Three civilians were wounded as a result of Azeri fire, the Armenian foreign ministry said.
Witnesses in Stepanakert said they heard several explosions on Friday night and in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Armenia also said several Azeri drones flew over settlements in Armenia, attacked military installations and damaged civilian infrastructure.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called the at
tacks “an attempted genocide of the Armenian people”.
“We must defend ourselves, like any nation that is threatened with extermination,” he told the French newspaper, Liberation.
The Azerbaijan authorities said yesterday that 60 Azeri civilians had been killed and 270 wounded since the fighting flared up on September 27. Azerbaijan has not disclosed its military casualties.
The ethnic-Armenian administration in Nagorno-Karabakh said 633 of its military personnel were killed so far, and 34 civilians.
Azerbaijan and Armenia continued to accuse each other of carrying out attacks that breached a week- old truce