BAKU: Azerbaijan launched military action in the Nagorno-Karabakh region on Tuesday, a step that could presage a new war in the volatile area but which Baku said was necessary to restore constitutional order and drive out Armenian military formations.

A spokesperson for the Azeri government called upon pro-Armenian fighters to lay down their arms `immediately’.

Karabakh is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory, but part of it is run by breakaway ethnic Armenian authorities who say the area is their ancestral homeland. It has been at the centre of two wars — the latest in 2020 — since the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union.

It was not clear whether Baku’s actions would trigger a full-scale conflict dragging in neighbouring Armenia or be a more limited military operation. But there were already signs of political fallout in Yerevan, where Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan spoke of calls for a coup against him.

The fighting could alter the geopolitical balance in the South Caucasus region, which is crisscrossed with oil and gas pipelines, and where Russia — distracted by its own war in Ukraine — is seeking to preserve its influence in the face of greater interest from Turkiye, which backs Azerbaijan. Loud and repeated shelling was audible from social media footage filmed in Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh, called Khankendi by Azerbaijan, on Tuesday.

In a statement announcing its operation, Azerbaijan’s defence ministry spoke of its intention to “disarm and secure the withdrawal of formations of Armenia’s armed forces from our territories, (and) neutralise their military infrastructure”.

It said it was only targeting legitimate military targets using “high-precision weapons” and not civilians as part of what it called a drive to “restore the constitutional order of the Republic of Azerbaijan”.

Civilians were free to leave by humanitarian corridors, it added, including one to Armenia, whose prime minister, Pashinyan, said the offer looked like another attempt by Baku to get ethnic Armenians to leave Karabakh as part of a campaign of what he called “ethnic cleansing”, an accusation Baku denies.

Ethnic Armenian forces in Karabakh said Azerbaijani forces were trying to break through their defences after heavy shelling, but that they were holding the line for now.

Armenia, which had been holding peace talks with Azerbaijan, including on questions about Karabakh’s future, condemned what it called Baku’s “full-scale aggression” against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh and accused Azerbaijan of shelling towns and villages.

Appeal for help

Armenia, which says its armed forces are not in Karabakh and that the situation on its own border with Azerbaijan is stable, called on members of the UN Security Council to help and for Russian peacekeepers on the ground to intervene.

Russia, which brokered a fragile ceasefire after the war in 2020 which saw Azerbaijan recapture swathes of land in and around Karabakh that it had lost in an earlier conflict in the 1990s, called for all sides to stop fighting.

Russia is in touch with both Azerbaijan and Armenia and has urged negotiations to resolve the conflict, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Published in Dawn, September 20th, 2023