They flee in cars, busses - and trucks. Vehicles choke the road leading out of Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia. The people crammed inside have exhaustion etched on their faces. Many spent the night on the road. They fear they are leaving their ancestral lands for good.
ike Rafik and Susan, dozens of Armenian families are reluctantly packing their bags in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed enclave in the heart of the Caucasus where a brief war between Armenia and Azerbaijan claimed more than 5,000 lives in 2020.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a mountainous area in the Caucasus region between Europe and Asia. For more than 30 years, it's been locked in a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The fight between the two countries began in the early 20th century but became a frozen conflict for 60 years while the whole region was under the control of the Soviet Union.
In surrendered areas of Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian villagers like Martinios have five days to pack and leave before Azeri forces arrive. The district where he lives, Kalbajar, was given up by Armenia as part of a ceasefire deal, which brought a brutal six-week war with Azerbaijan to an end. War here has been generational, and in the 1990s it was the Azeris who fled these villages in a ceasefire handover. Martinios himself moved here soon after to escape the persecution against Armenians in Azerbaijan. Now that peace has been brokered, and after decades of bitterness and mutual distrust, can he bear to leave behind the home he built?
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After three weeks of fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia, both sides have leaned on their domestic media to give their version of events. We examine the events in Nagorno-Karabakh and the dangers of war reporting in the age of COVID-19.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan are determined to claim Nagorno-Karabakh as their own.
Dozens have been killed, including a child. Both sides are blaming each other for starting the fighting – and they’ve both deployed heavy artillery along the border.
