On Sunday, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev stated Azerbaijan would not stop military action until Armenia puts forth a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding Azeri territories.
“Azerbaijan has one condition, and that is the liberation of its territories,” Aliyev said in a televised address to the country.
Aliyev stated Azerbaijan’s troops were moving forward in a week-long strategy to reclaim territories that they lost to ethnic Armenians in the 1990s.
“Nagorno-Karabakh is the territory of Azerbaijan. We must return and we shall return.”
“My condition is the following: let them withdraw their troops, and the confrontation will be stopped, but this should not be in words, but in deeds,” Aliyev added.
President Aliyev also said that for three decades the international community failed to implement UN resolutions or force Armenia to return Azerbaijan’s territories.
Right after Aliyev’s speech, Armenian Defence Ministry official Artsrun Hovhannisyan said: “I don’t think that there is any risk for Yerevan (the Armenian capital), but anyway we are in war.”
Russia, the United States, and the European Union have urged for an immediate ceasefire and the international community has raised concern about the regional stability of the South Caucasus, where pipelines carry Azeri oil and gas to world markets.
Regional powers also have the potential to be dragged into the conflict as with Azerbaijan backed by Turkey and Armenia with Russia.
Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed in the past week’s clashes between Azerbaijan and ethnic Armenian forces, including over 40 civilians.
As Azerbaijan claims to have lost faith in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) over its failure to resolve the conflict, the main fighting between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan, now threatens to spill over into a direct war with Armenia itself.
Arayik Harutyunyan, Nagorno-Karabakh’s leader, said his ethnic Armenian troops would target military units located in Azerbaijan’s large cities.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a 30-year-old conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region since the war of 1994. The 1990s clashes led to the killing of around 30,000 people.
Though a ceasefire was agreed on post the 1994 war, Azerbaijan and Armenia continue to accuse each other of shooting attacks, ceasefire violations, and shelling around Nagorno-Karabakh and along the separate Azeri-Armenian frontier.
The conflict re-erupted again recently and caused some of the heaviest clashes in years. The overall death toll has now gone above 100, with Azerbaijan losing 24 civilians and Armenia 2.