Friday, 29 March, 2024, 2:06 PM
Advance Search
Home

Fiercest clashes since 1990s rage

100 dead in Armenia-Azerbaijan fighting

Published : Wednesday, 30 September, 2020 at 12:00 AM  Count : 247

YEREVAN, Sept 29: Azerbaijani and Armenian forces claimed to have inflicted heavy losses as fighting raged for a third day on Tuesday over the breakaway region of Nagorny Karabakh.
Urgent calls from world leaders for a halt to the fierce clashes that erupted on Sunday have gone unheeded by the ex-Soviet rivals, who have been locked for decades in a territorial dispute over Karabakh.
The UN Security Council was scheduled to meet Tuesday for emergency talks on the military escalation over the ethnic Armenian exclave, where intense fighting in recent days has caused nearly 100 confirmed deaths.
Any move to all-out war could drag in major regional powers Russia and Turkey. Moscow has a defence alliance with Armenia, which provides vital support to the enclave and is its lifeline to the outside world, while Ankara backs its ethnic Turkic kin in Azerbaijan.
"We haven't seen anything like this since the ceasefire to the war in the 1990s. The fighting is taking place along all sections of the front line," said Olesya Vartanyan, senior analyst for the South Caucasus region at Crisis Group.
Both sides said fighting was continuing on Tuesday, despite international pleas for a ceasefire. Armenian defence officials said separatists in Karabakh had repelled Azerbaijani attacks along the frontline and that "the enemy suffered serious losses in manpower".
The defence ministry in Yerevan said Azerbaijan's military had suffered major losses since the clashes erupted, with nearly 50 drones and four helicopters downed, and 80 tanks destroyed. Defence officials in Azerbaijan's capital Baku in turn dismissed claims by separatist fighters that the Armenian-backed troops had regained control of territory in Karabakh lost in fighting Sunday.
They said "fierce fighting" had persisted in the early hours of Tuesday and that their military had repelled an Armenian counterattack, destroying "an Armenian motorised column and an artillery unit" and, later, an entire motorised infantry regiment.
Azerbaijani forces "continued an offensive on the city of Fizuli, destroying four enemy tanks, an armoured vehicle and killing 10 troops," officials in Baku said. "The enemy... asked for help to evacuate corpses and wounded troops" from the battlefield, it said.   -AFP








Latest News
Most Read News
Editor : Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury
Published by the Editor on behalf of the Observer Ltd. from Globe Printers, 24/A, New Eskaton Road, Ramna, Dhaka.
Editorial, News and Commercial Offices : Aziz Bhaban (2nd floor), 93, Motijheel C/A, Dhaka-1000.
Phone: PABX- 41053001-06; Online: 41053014; Advertisement: 41053012.
E-mail: info©dailyobserverbd.com, news©dailyobserverbd.com, advertisement©dailyobserverbd.com, For Online Edition: mailobserverbd©gmail.com
  [ABOUT US]     [CONTACT US]   [AD RATE]   Developed & Maintenance by i2soft