Global Courant
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan will meet his ally, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, on Monday, as thousands of ethnic Armenians began an exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan defeated the breakaway region’s fighters last week.
Erdogan will make a one-day visit to Azerbaijan’s autonomous exclave of Nakhchivan – a strip of Azerbaijani territory located between Armenia, Iran and Turkey – to discuss with Aliyev the situation in the Karabakh region, the Turkish president’s office said.
The Armenians of Karabakh, an area internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but previously outside its control, were forced into a ceasefire last week after a 24-hour military operation by the much larger Azerbaijani army.
On Sunday, Nagorno-Karabakh’s leaders told Reuters that the region’s 120,000 Armenians did not want to live as part of Azerbaijan for fear of persecution and ethnic cleansing, and they began to flee the area.
Russian news agency RIA quoted an Armenian government statement early on Monday saying that more than 1,500 people had entered Armenia from Nagorno-Karabkah as of midnight (2000 GMT).
Those with fuel had begun driving through the Lachin corridor to the border with Armenia, according to a Reuters reporter in the capital of Karabakh, known as Stepanakert by Armenia and Khankendi by Azerbaijan.
Photos from Reuters showed dozens of cars heading out of the capital towards the mountainous curves of the corridor.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars over the enclave in three decades – with Azerbaijan regaining large swathes of territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh in a six-week conflict in 2020.
Erdogan, who backed the Azeris with weapons in the 2020 conflict, said last week that he supported the objectives of Azerbaijan’s latest military operation but had no role in it.
Armenia says more than 200 people were killed and 400 injured in last week’s operation in Azerbaijan, a hostility condemned by the United States and Armenia’s other Western allies.
On Sunday, Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said it had seized more military equipment from Armenian separatists, including rockets, artillery shells, mines and ammunition.
Karabakh Armenians do not accept Azerbaijan’s promise to guarantee their rights as the region is integrated. Armenia called for the immediate deployment of a UN mission to monitor human rights and security in the region.
“Ninety-nine point nine percent prefer to leave our historic country,” David Babayan, adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, president of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, told Reuters. REUTERS
