US urges Azerbaijan to protect Armenians as thousands flee Karabakh

In the vanquished breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, hungry and fatigued Armenian residents clogged roadways to evacuate houses as the United States pleaded with Azerbaijan to safeguard civilians and allow in relief.

This week, the Armenians of Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan that has been out of Baku’s control since the fall of the Soviet Union, started to leave after their troops were routed by the Azerbaijani military in a quick military operation.

On the first day of the migration, at least 13,550 of the 120,000 ethnic Armenians who call Nagorno-Karabakh home made it to Armenia, hundreds of automobiles and buses jam-packed with belongings winding down the mountain route out of Azerbaijan.

Others escaped on tractors, while some were jammed into the backs of open-topped trucks. Narine Shakaryan, a four-grandmother, arrived in her son-in-law’s old car with 6 people packed inside. The 77km drive had taken 24 hours, she said. They had had no food.

“The whole way the children were crying, they were hungry,” Shakaryan told Reuters at the border, carrying her 3-year old granddaughter, who she said had become ill during the journey.

“We left so we would stay alive, not to live.”

Fuel stations were overrun by panic buying as Armenians hurried to evacuate the Karabakh city, known by Armenia as Stepanakert and by Azerbaijan as Khankendi. The officials there reported that a petroleum storage facility explosion on Monday resulted in at least 20 fatalities and 290 injuries in a major fire.

In the Armenian capital Yerevan, Samantha Power, the director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), urged Azerbaijan “to maintain the ceasefire and take concrete steps to protect the rights of civilians in Nagorno-Karabakh”.

Power, who had previously presented a letter of solidarity from U.S. President Joe Biden to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia, stated that Azerbaijan’s use of force was wrong and that the United States was considering the best course of action.

She urged President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to honour his pledge to defend the rights of ethnic Armenians, fully reopen the Lachin corridor connecting the area to Armenia, and permit relief delivery as well as an international monitoring team.

Although Aliyev promised to ensure the protection of the Armenians in Karabakh, he claimed that his iron hand had relegated the idea of the region’s independence to antiquity.

Armenians of ethnicity who made it there shared horrifying experiences of escaping starvation, war, and death.

Some claimed to have seen numerous dead citizens; one stated truckloads. Others, some of whom were carrying small children, sobbed uncontrollably as they related their horrific odysseys of fleeing conflict, sleeping on the ground, and experiencing intense hunger.

“We took what we could and left. We don’t know where we’re going. We have nowhere to go,” Petya Grigoryan, a 69-year-old driver, told Reuters in the border town of Goris on Sunday.

According to USAID’s Power, the world will soon learn more about the harsh conditions in Karabakh and what the residents had to go through to make the decision to leave.

(With agency inputs)