World powers have issued urgent calls for calm after at least 30 people were reportedly killed in the worst fighting in decades over the disputed Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenians and Azeris accused each other of triggering the violence. This has raised particular alarm due to tensions over Syria between regional heavyweights Russia and Turkey, which are the main backers of Armenia and Azerbaijan respectively.
In sporadic fighting over the weekend, Armenia said 18 soldiers were killed and Azerbaijan reported that 12 of its servicemen had died.
It was not clear if the Armenian figures referred to soldiers fighting for Armenia’s national army or for the armed forces of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh is an ethnic Armenian region that broke from Azerbaijan in a 1988-94 war that killed some 30,000 people and drove more than one million others from their homes.
The sides often accuse each other of killing and injuring people with sniper and mortar fire along the so-called ceasefire line. The latest fighting reportedly involved tanks, heavy artillery and helicopters.
Russia supplies weapons to mostly Muslim Azerbaijan and mostly Christian Armenia but has much closer ties with the latter. It maintains an army base and an airbase on Armenian territory.
Beautiful but poor
Turkey, which is Azerbaijan’s chief ally, closed its border with Armenia in 1993 due to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a remote, beautiful but poor region that is still internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country would support Azerbaijan "to the end".
“We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes with the least casualties,” Mr Erdogan said. At the same time he sharply criticised the so-called Minsk Group of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) that leads talks to resolve the conflict.
The OSCE’s Minsk Group is co-chaired by France, Russia and the US.
"We urge the sides to show restraint, avoid further escalation, and strictly adhere to the ceasefire," US secretary of state John Kerry said in a statement.
“The unstable situation on the ground demonstrates why the sides must enter into an immediate negotiation under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs on a comprehensive settlement of the conflict,” Mr Kerry said. “We reiterate that there is no military solution to the conflict.”
Russia’s defence and foreign ministers discussed the fighting with their Armenia and Azeri counterparts, and the Kremlin called for an urgent cessation of hostilities.
“President [Vladimir] Putin calls on the parties in the conflict to observe an immediate ceasefire and exercise restraint in order to prevent further casualties,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The European Union and the United Nations secretary general also called for an end to fighting and for moves to de-escalate tension between the neighbours in the volatile south Caucasus region, a key energy transit zone bordering Iran.
Propaganda around the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh is fierce in Azerbaijan and Armenia, and reliable information from the remote area is hard to acquire.
Violated norms
Azeri president Ilham Aliyev announced a unilateral ceasefire on Sunday after Azeri media claimed that its military had retaken some territory in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Mr Aliyev also vowed to “try to resolve the conflict peacefully”, even though Armenia had “violated all the norms of unilateral international law”.
Officials in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, however, denied that fighting had stopped.
“The statement by the Azerbaijan side is an information trap and does not amount to a unilateral ceasefire,” said Artsrun Hovhannisyan, a spokesman for Armenia’s defence ministry.
A spokesman for the Nagorno-Karabakh authorities told Russia’s Interfax news agency on Sunday that “hostilities continue”.
“In the last 24 hours, Azerbaijan has twice declared a cessation of hostilities, but . . . no practical steps have been taken on their side,” he said.
