As winter approaches tens of thousands of besieged civilians are facing possible starvation in a contested mountain region of Azerbaijan as a ten-week crisis reaches breaking point.
Populated by a local Armenian majority, Nagorno-Karabakh – the name means “mountainous Karabakh” in Russian – broke away from the new republic of Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thousands of people on both sides were killed in the war that followed, while hundreds of thousands lost their homes, most of them Azerbaijanis in and around Karabakh who became internal exiles in Azerbaijan. The conflict simmered for decades until in 2020 Azerbaijan reversed these outcomes in a bitterly fought second war in which it retook most of the territories it had lost in the 1990s. Karabakh’s
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