His roads Stepanakertits capital Nagorno Karabakh, are “full of hungry and scared displaced people,” a local official said today, the day after delivery to Azerbaijanafter 24 hours of fighting, of this breakaway region inhabited by Armenians.
“People are desperately looking for each other and appealing (…) for news about their relatives,” Gegham Stepanian, an official at the human rights watchdog, added on Platform X, formerly Twitter.
In Karabakh, scores of Armenians have fled their homes over the past three days, some taking refuge in the main city’s airport and others in the Russian peacekeeping force.
On the Armenian side of the border with Azerbaijan, on a remote hillside near the village of Kornindzor, Armenian men in a phalanx of 20 cars are waiting for friends and family members trapped in Karabakh, should they be allowed to leave, Reuters notes.
A man who gave only his first name, Haik, said he spent days at the border hoping to find his father, who had gone to Karabakh on business when the blockade was imposed last December and has been trapped there ever since.
Residents of Stepanakert said they have no electricity, shops are empty and people are lighting fires in the countryside to cook whatever food they can find.
“There are many displaced people from the villages, they just came to the city and had nowhere to spend the night,” said Gayan Sargsyan, who heads a wellness business in the city.
In an audio message, he told Reuters that there were various rumors about what might happen and that the world was in “chaos and confusion”.
Armenia is ready to welcome “more than 40,000 families”, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said
Armenia is ready, if necessary, to receive “more than 40,000 families” from Nagorno-Karabakh after the enclave’s Armenian separatists capitulated following the military offensive launched by Azerbaijan, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said today.
“We have booked rooms in hotels, we have prepared spaces to welcome them. We have everything ready to welcome more than 40,000 families” from this breakaway region of Azerbaijan, where mainly Armenians live, Pashinyan said in a televised address.
However, he stressed that the civilian population there does not at this stage face an “immediate threat” after Azerbaijan’s lightning military victory.
“Today, my judgment (of the situation) is that there is no immediate threat against the civilian population of Nagorno-Karabakh,” he stressed.
At the same time, he said that the truce, which has been in effect since yesterday Wednesday in the enclave, is being respected to a large extent.
“The cease-fire regime in Nagorno-Karabakh is maintained in its entirety, there have been individual violations, but overall the situation is stable,” the Armenian Prime Minister stressed.
Source: News Beast
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