Azerbaijani army enters new district inside Karabakh

The Azerbaijani troops entered the Agdam district in Nagorno-Karabakh on Friday, in line with the trilateral ceasefire agreement, the country’s Ministry of Defence said.

“Units of the Azerbaijani army entered the Agdam district on 20 November, in line with the trilateral statement signed by the President of the Azerbaijani Republic, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia and the President of the Russian Federation,” the ministry said in a statement.

Agdam is a ghost town formerly controlled by the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, otherwise known as Artsakh; it is located in the centre of a district with the same time. The town, which was home to over 30,000 people at the time of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, found itself in between warring Azerbaijan and its breakaway region. On 4 July 1993, the last residents of the town were evacuated as Armenian troops advanced and it was abandoned, earning it the name ‘Hiroshima of the Caucasus’.

On 10 November, Russian, Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders Vladimir Putin, Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan signed a joint statement on the complete cessation of hostilities in Karabakh.

In line with the statement, Armenia and Azerbaijan stop at occupied positions, a number of Karabakh regions come under Baku’s control, the sides exchange prisoners, and Russian peacekeepers are deployed along the line of contact and in the Lachin Corridor connecting Karabakh with Armenia.

As the agreement resulted in the loss of most territory controlled by the Armenian-majority self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), it ignited mass rallies, staged by the opposition, in Armenia’s capital Yerevan.