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Azerbaijan says lost 2,855 troops in Nagorno-Karabakh war

Tuesday, 19 January 2021 2:18 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 19 January 2021 3:12 PM ]

A picture released by the Azerbaijani presidency on January 15, 2021 shows Azeri President Ilham Aliyev kneeling in front of the national flag during a visit to the city of Shusha, which came under the control of Azerbaijan following a military conflict with Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. (Via AFP)

Azerbaijani says it lost more than 2,800 troops during the 44-day war with neighboring Armenia over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the Azeri Defense Ministry said that the army had lost at least 2,855 soldiers during the war with Armenia over the region.

It updated the death toll from the war after learning of some funerals and the identities of the deceased soldiers.

The ministry added that at least 50 Azerbaijani troopers were also still missing.

Baku had previously provided a slightly lower death toll from the war.

Armenia has announced that 2,317 of its troops were killed during the war, which also killed more than 90 Azerbaijani and 50 Armenian civilians.

Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but it has been occupied by ethnic Armenian separatists backed by Armenia since 1992 when they broke from Azerbaijan in a war that killed some 30,000 people.

The conflict erupted on September 27 last year and ended on November 10 with a Russian-brokered truce.

As part of the truce agreement, Armenia returned swathes of territory it had occupied for decades to Azeri control.

Armenia acknowledges loss of Karabakh’s second largest city

‘A chain of misfortunes follows and Shushi city is not in our control,’ said a spokesman for the Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian leadership.

The agreement was signed after the Azerbaijani army overwhelmed Armenian forces and threatened to advance on Karabakh’s main city of Khankendi, which Armenians call Stepanakert after a 19th-century Bolshevik militant.

The truce, which was warmly welcomed as a victory in Azerbaijan, has prompted anger in Armenia, with protesters demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

Also under the ceasefire, nearly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers have been stationed along the Lachin corridor in Azerbaijan, a 60-kilometer-long route that links Khankendi to Armenia.

Once the handover of the occupied territories is complete, the next phase of the ceasefire would include the withdrawal of Armenian forces and separatists from Karabakh and the return of refugees to their homes, where Azerbaijanis and Armenians are about to live together under the suzerainty of Baku.

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