‘They Taunted our Children with Knives’: Armenia’s Exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh

When the drumbeat of artillery began on 19 September, six-year-old Robert Khosrovyan was ambling home from school. Instead of taking the usual path, he fled down a rocky embankment to reach his house in Chartar, a town in the self-declared Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. 

His parents, mad with worry, went in search of him when his classmates returned without him. Unbeknown to them, Robert had crept into an outhouse on their property and crawled into a fridge to hide from the Azeri soldiers he had learned to fear, refusing to show himself even when his loved ones screamed his name. He stayed there for hours before they found him.

Days later, when Azeri soldiers swarmed their settlement, Robert’s mother, Arevik Grigoryan, a caretaker at a local school, watched them laugh as they brandished their knives at the children who cowered at the edge of the town square. Then they went door to door, Arevik said, looking through the bundles that families had hastily packed and tearing open the women’s handbags, helping themselves to whatever they wished. This encounter, while terrifying, might have been far worse if not for a curt bark from a unit commander telling the soldiers to sheave their weapons.

Arevik and her husband Ernest Khosrovyan, a construction worker, found an abandoned school bus which they filled with their nine children and 24 other locals before collecting relatives at the Karabakh capital of Stepanekurt and fleeing for the Armenian border, stopped along the way by Azeri soldiers who searched their vehicle and took photos of the men. They had survived a nine-month blockade, when Azerbaijan closed the only road to Armenia from Karabakh, choking those inside of food and supplies from the outside world. Now they were leaving their homeland forever, along with over 100,000 others, almost the entire population of Artsakh – the Armenian name for Karabakh. 

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“Peace developments and bright days are close in Karabakh”

When Azerbaijan launched its brutal blitzkrieg to reclaim the mountainous enclave, killing over 200 people, including at least 10 civilians, according to estimates by Karabakh officials, stories of atrocities followed the tide of refugees. While these claims have not yet been verified, they have a precedent; In 2020, when Azeri forces captured land around Karabakh, they were known to mutilate Armenian soldiers and behead elderly civilians who had not fled.

Anoush Bagdassarian, an American human rights lawyer collecting evidence of Azeri war crimes, spent days interviewing refugees flooding into the Armenian border town of Goris. She told me of Maria, a middle-aged woman from Martakert whose relative, an elderly grandmother in the town, died with her nine-year-old grandson in her arms when a bomb struck their home.

“People feel scared, incredibly vulnerable and traumatised,” Anoush said.

“The majority of people I asked answered ‘how can we live together when they have beheaded us, killed our children, and made very clear their intentions about ridding the world of Armenians?’” 

Then there were the deaths caused by months of deliberate deprivation. As one man who spoke to Anoush described it, “they choked the very air to breathe.” Parkev Aghababyan, a father of two from Askeran and his wife, Anush, witnessed one child die of an epileptic fit after he ran out of medication and another boy, just 10 years old, perish after being shoved to the ground where he struck his head on the concrete pavement when a fight broke out over bread in the final days of the Azeri blockade. “He died right there, within minutes,” Anush said in her testimony. 

Such stories imbue the seemingly harmless text messages, sent by Azeri authorities to Kharabakh Armenians during their offensive, with a cruel and sinister irony. These texts, which supported Azerbaijan’s claims that they wanted the local populace to stay, added to the fog of confusion after they hijacked the communications infrastructure, preventing locals from connecting with the outside world or with each other. “Peace developments and bright days are close in Karabakh,” read one, while another read: “Azerbaijani government guarantees your safety.”