Vinayak Barot
NEW DELHI, Sep 28: The United States will intervene to try to stop the fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia that broke out on Saturday night over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
During his White House media briefing on Sunday, the US president Donald Trump said, the US was concerned over the fighting between the Azerbaijan and Armenian forces and “Washington is looking into what can be done to stop the flare-up of tensions in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
“We are looking at it very strongly. We have a lot of good relationships in that area, we will see if we can stop it,” Trump said.
Washington urged Armenia and Azerbaijan to cooperate with the Minsk Group co-chairs, which, aside from the US, include France and Russia, with the aim to “returning to substantive negotiations as soon as possible”
According to the Armenian Defence Ministry “Azerbaijan fought with us throughout the night” while Azerbaijan’s defence ministry said Armenian forces were shelling the town of Terter.
Supporting their army, some local citizens of Armenia said that Azerbaijan had been constantly creating problems for them. Some of the people said that they were “tired of Azerbaijan’s threat” and that they would like to see end of the problem once and for all.
“We are a step away from a large-scale war. One of the main reasons for the current escalation is a lack of any proactive international mediation between the sides for weeks” Olesya Vartanyan of the International Crisis Group told the media.
The clashes between the two former Soviet republics, which fought a war in the 1990s, were the latest flare-up of a long-running conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region that is inside Azerbaijan but is run by ethnic Armenians.
Armenia throws allegations on the Azerbaijan that “Azerbaijani forces had attacked civilian targets including Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital and Stepanakert,”
On the dispute and fight – Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wrote on Twitter “We stay strong next to our army to protect our motherland from Azeri invasion,” while Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said “We defend our territory, our cause is right! echoing the words of Joseph Stalin at the outbreak of World War II in Russia. ‘Karabakh is Azerbaijan,”
Azerbaijan denied an Armenian defence ministry statement that said Azerbaijani helicopters and tanks had been destroyed.
