Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan is to meet his ally Azeri President Ilham Aliyev on Monday (25 September), as thousands of ethnic Armenians began an exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan defeated the breakaway region’s fighters last week.
Erdoğan will pay a one-day visit to Azerbaijan’s autonomous Nahichivan exclave – a strip of Azeri territory nestled between Armenia, Iran and Turkey – to discuss with Aliyev the situation in the Karabakh region, the Turkish president’s office said.
Turkey aims at establishing a corridor connecting Nahichivan to mainland Azerbaijan, which according to Ankara would constitute a Turkic axe spanning from Turkey’s mainland trough the Uigurs in China.
The Armenians of Karabakh, a territory internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but previously beyond its control, were forced into a ceasefire last week after a 24-hour military operation by the much-larger Azerbaijani military.
On Sunday, the Nagorno-Karabakh leadership told Reuters the region’s 120,000 Armenians did not want to live as part of Azerbaijan for fear of persecution and ethnic cleansing and started fleeing the area.
If 120,000 people go down the Lachin corridor to Armenia, the small South Caucasian country could face a humanitarian crisis.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on Friday that space had been allocated for at least 40,000 people.
Russia’s RIA news agency cited early on Monday an Armenian government statement saying that more than 1,500 people had crossed into Armenia from Nagorno-Karabkah as of midnight (2000 GMT).
Those with fuel had started to drive down the Lachin corridor toward the border with Armenia, according to a Reuters reporter in the Karabakh capital known as Stepanakert by Armenia and Khankendi by Azerbaijan.
Reuters pictures showed dozens of cars driving out of the capital toward the corridor’s mountainous curves.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars over the enclave in 30 years — with Azerbaijan gaining back swathes of territory in and around Nagorno-Karabakh in a six-week conflict in 2020.
Erdoğan, who backed the Azeris with weaponry in the 2020 conflict, said last week he supported the aims of the Azerbaijan’s latest military operation but played no part in it.
Armenia says more than 200 people were killed and 400 wounded in last week’s Azeri operation, a hostility condemned by the United States and other Western allies of Armenia.
On Sunday, Azerbaijan’s defence ministry said it had confiscated more military equipment from Armenian separatists, including rockets, artillery shells, mines and ammunition.
The Karabakh Armenians are not accepting Azerbaijan’s promise to guarantee their rights as the region is integrated. Armenia called for an immediate deployment of a UN mission to monitor human rights and security in the region.
“Ninety-nine point nine percent prefer to leave our historic lands,” David Babayan, an adviser to Samvel Shahramanyan, president of the self-styled Republic of Artsakh, told Reuters.
It is not clear where 120,000 people could be housed in Armenia, whose population is just 2.8 million, ahead of winter.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had started registering people who were looking for unaccompanied children or who had lost contact with loved ones.
For Azerbaijan, the exit of Armenians from Karabakh is a major victory that brings an apparent close to many years of war and squabbling over the region.
President Ilham Aliyev said his iron fist had consigned the idea of an independent ethnic Armenian Karabakh to history and that the region would be turned into a “paradise” as part of Azerbaijan.
Upcoming EU mediation
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will hold a pre-arranged meeting in Spain next month despite Baku’s lightning offensive against Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh, Yerevan said on Sunday.
The talks on 5 October in Grenada will include French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and European Council chief Charles Michel, the Armenian security council said in a statement, adding that officials will meet to prepare the talks next week.
(Edited by Georgi Gotev)