Impoverished, hungry, and thirsty, thousands of Armenians are fleeing their homes in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in search of a safe haven, while a convoy from Azerbaijan and Armenia is travelling to Brussels to find a “solution” aimed at ending the hostilities.
The situation in the enclave, which is a ‘bone of contention’ for Azerbaijan, is still hellish. Many of the human stories making the rounds on the Internet are chilling.
Videos and photos posted on social media show residents of Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno Karabakh, packing up their belongings and loading them into cars and trucks in search of gasoline.
The area had been blockaded by Azerbaijani-backed activists for nine months, causing chronic shortages of food, medicine, and fuel, according to Politico.
Most of those who fled Nagorno-Karabakh were women, children, and the elderly, the deputy mayor of the Armenian city of Goris, Irina Yolian, told the Armenpress news network yesterday.
🇦🇲 At the border between #Armenia and #Azerbaijan, cars and trucks arrive one by one, packed with displaced families fleeing Nagorno-#Karabakh.
FRANCE 24’s team on the ground has been visiting border checkpoints and talking with refugees.
Take a look 👇 pic.twitter.com/VDdKBW7rWn
— FRANCE 24 English (@France24_en) September 26, 2023
Goris is located a stone’s throw from the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, near the Lachin road connecting the enclave to Armenia. A corridor has been opened to allow civilians to leave the war zone, Poghosyan claims.
“We lived nightmarish days,” says 41-year-old Anabel Gulassian, from the village of Rev, known as Shalva in Azeri. As she explains to the French agency “France 24”, she arrived in Goris with her family in a van carrying her belongings in bags.
Nona Poghosian “tried for hours to decide which are the most important things that can fit in her suitcase”.
Her nine-year-old twin children were upstairs deciding which of their belongings they should leave behind. “They cry about every toy they part with,” Poghosyan, a program coordinator at the American University of Armenia in the capital Stepanakert, told CNN.
Residents of Nagorno-Karabakh prepare to live in exile. Fearing ethnic cleansing by the Azerbaijani army, some refugees believe they will never return home, one of them tells Politico.
Many refugees have gathered at the Goris Hotel, a remnant of the Soviet era that is now one of the first stops for those fleeing to Armenia from the war-torn region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
In the lobby of the Goris Hotel, children hold plastic bags filled with snacks, while elderly people gather around a man pulling medicine from a box and calling out names to give them.
Of the roughly 100,000 people living in Nagorno-Karabakh territory, Armenian officials said more than 13,550 people had already fled their homes by 8 a.m. Tuesday, while photos taken from its capital, Stepanakert, show huge queues of civilians, suitcases in hand, accompanied by Russian mediators.
