After a month of conflict and three failed ceasefires, Armenians gird themselves for a punishing winter war. Tom Mutch reports from the frontline around Stepanakert
We were driving down the Lachin corridor, the narrow road that connects the self-declared Republic of Artsakh to Armenia proper, when the shells fell. For about 30 seconds we could hear the boom of artillery fire echo in the hills around us. The sky was thick with the sound of shells ricocheting. “Oh sh*t!” my driver, a lanky man in his early 30s shouted, “they weren’t supposed to be this close yet!”
A few minutes later, our driver pulled over to a small hamlet to pick up a hitchhiker. A heavy-set Armenian man of 67, dressed in a grey suit jacket and jeans jumped in. He was wielding an AK74 with three extra magazines taped to its side. His name was Shahen and there was revenge in his eyes.
As we drove off, he told us how, several days ago, Azeri troops had stormed and captured his village near the province of Hadrut. He had just dropped off his wife and daughter to safety in Armenia, while his son and grandson were fighting on the frontline. Now he was out for revenge. He told us his plan was to sneak into an enemy military camp and take as many enemy soldiers with him as he could before he was inevitably gunned down.
His story is one of many that captures the brutality, desperation and savagery of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that broke out on 27 September over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, also known to locals as Artsakh.
When we pulled into its capital of Stepanakert, Shahen jumped out and thanked us. I shook his hand and never saw him again.
In peacetime, “the city is gorgeous, calm, with the cleanest of skies,” Anna Grigoryan, a 22-year-old from Stepanakert, told me. Now those clear skies had given Azerbaijan’s artillery and drones perfect visibility to strike military or civilian targets. “It was such a beautiful place,” she said with the glint of a tear in her eye.
In many ways, it still is. Every morning, the few locals that remain take brooms and shovels to sweep the streets of broken glass. They string patriotic banners that read ‘Artsakh is Strong’ over the front of broken sections of walls and windows. Even in their darkest hours they take pride in the appearance of their city.
If you look around a central square, there will be a flawless circular apostolic church built of rose brick. A dule of doves will loiter on the roof of a nearby building. The day before I arrived, they even staged a wedding in a damaged church. Then the sound of explosions wring out in the hill and you remember that this is currently the world’s deadliest war.
Failed Ceasefire
The ceasefire was over by lunchtime. A press officer in military gear beckoned us to follow him and showed us to a huge crater in a field next to the village of Shushuran. “Ceasefire has become a funny word here,” he said. The shell was estimated to have hit at around 9 am, an hour after the ceasefire’s official start.
Nagorno Karabakh is officially considered part of Azerbaijan by every country in the world. But, having wrestled it from Azerbaijan in a brutal war that killed around 30,000 people between 1992 and 1994, the territory is de facto governed from Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, and populated by ethnic Armenians who consider it to be part of their ancestral homeland.
While there have been sporadic clashes over the territory since, the current outbreak of fighting is by far the worst since the first war. Official figures show that around 1,000 Armenian soldiers have been killed, while Azerbaijan refuses to provide figures. The soldiers fighting reckon that the true figure is at least double that, with an equal number of casualties on the Azerbaijan side. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tried and, so far, failed to broker peace said that up to 5,000 people could already have been killed in a month – this is of a combined population of 13 million. To give some scale of the destruction, around 4,500 US troops have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion and its various insurgencies.
The southern town has seen some of the worst destruction. Outside the heavily bombed former mayor’s building, a posse of stray dogs fought over the leftover scraps the soldiers had left for them. The inside of the building was covered with the wreckage of desks and door frames. Every step was accompanied by the crack of broken glass.
Many of the buildings that have been targeted are civilian, although most civilians have since been evacuated into Armenia. One good omen for the troops is that the statue of Monte Melkonian in the square outside has remained miraculously unharmed. ‘Monty’ as he is affectionately known, was one of the most effective commanders in the first war and is a hero to Armenians.
As we drive back from Martuni, a huge bang goes off beside our van. Looking outside, a rocket has exploded and white smoke is pouring from a hole less than a hundred metres to our left. Our driver slams down the accelerator and we take off at what must be close to 150km an hour. As we were skidding around corners burning rubber, we saw three smaller pillars of smoke in the hills above us – drones, most likely, but with the intensity of the fighting no one can be quite sure. Our driver, who we started to nickname Michael Schumacher, drove at this click for another 15 minutes, well after we were out of danger. I suspect he was quite enjoying it.
Thursday was the worst day. The siren, which had previously gone off once or twice a day, went off almost constantly. My hotel lobby was full of bored soldiers chain-smoking, playing cards or chess. Then, around 9pm, a massive explosion on a mountain above Stepanakert lit up the sky. A message went out to all journalists saying that an Azeri – Azerbaijani – infiltration unit, which had been raining hell on us, had been located and destroyed by local forces.
Friday was the first quiet day in a long time.
Progress of the First ‘Video Game’ War
Back in our hotel in Stepanakert, as the siren rung out, no one panicked. A few eyes rolled as we slowly ambled down the hotel stairs to the bomb shelter. As we sat around the table, Arshak Hayryan, a veteran who commanded troops in the first war, recalled “back then, we fought in the hills with AK47s and captured tanks. Now it is all drones, drones, drones. The Turks don’t fight fair”. Some say it is like a video game, with enemy soldiers behind joysticks and computers.
Discussing the war with locals and troops, things were not going well. Rather than fight on foot against well-dug and well-trained Armenian forces, Azerbaijan’s weapons of choice have been precision-guided artillery directed by large fleets of drones. As Armenia has precious little in the way to defend against these attacks, it has lost a great deal of military hardware in mere days. This has included a rapid loss of territory in the Southern flatlands, which has raised a war fever in Azerbaijan that gives President Ilham Aliyev no reason to back down.
International attention is focused on COVID-19 and the US Presidential Election – there is little bandwidth to devote to a war somewhere that most people don’t know exists.