The Azerbaijani Armed Forces have been developing their advance on Armenian positions in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region. As in the previous several days, the main clashes are taking place in the southern part of Karabakh.
As of October 16, Azerbaijani forces finally took full control of the town of Hadrat and started an operation to push the remaining Armenian units out of the town’s surroundings. Despite this, Armenian forces still conduct regular counter-attacks attempting to force the Azerbaijani military to retreat from their recently captured positions.
Azerbaijani troops also seized the villages of Arish in the Fuzuli district, Doshulu in the Jabrayil district and the villages of Edishe, Dudukchi, Edilli and Chiraguz in the Khojavend district. Earlier this week, Azerbaijan captured Garadaghli, Melikjanli, Garakollu, Bulutan, Tagaser, Khatunbulag, Kemertuk and Teke. Thus, Armenian forces lost at least 15 towns and settlements during this week of clashes.
The Azerbaijani side employs its advantage in artillery and air power. Azerbaijani special forces also conducted several raids in the rear of Armenian positions in the south of Karabakh trying to create chaos there.
The town of Fuzuli, which for the previous days remained in the contested area, is now about to fall in the full control of Azerbaijan. If Armenian forces are not able to gain back the initiative, this will become the inevitable.
Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan announced that the Armenians tried to recapture several positions taken by Azerbaijani forces, but these attacks were repelled. According to Baku, a large number of Armenian forces, including two T-72 battle tanks, a Tor-M2KM surface-to-air missile system, four BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launchers, a D-20 howitzer, a D-30 howitzer, and two D-1 howitzers, as well as several vehicles and UAVs were eliminated.
On the morning of October 15, videos filmed in the area of Hadrut appeared online showing how Azerbaijani troops had captured two Armenian fighters, one of them was an old man (he does not even seem to be able to hold arms), then tied them with Armenian flags and had them killed. A few hours after, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry released a statement claiming that Armenians share in social media some ‘fake videos’ that are ‘not related’ to the Karabakh conflict.
Earlier, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and top Turkish officials repeatedly claimed that the Azerbaijani advance on Nagorno-Karabakh poses no threat to the Armenian population there. Nonetheless, actions like on the aforementioned videos as well as almost no reports about captured Armenian soldiers demonstrate that in fact the conflict creates a real threat of ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population in Karabakh the areas captured by Azerbaijan. In its own turn, the Armenian Defense Ministry claims that despite some ‘tactical retreats’, its forces have been successfully repelling Azerbaijani attacks.
This just week only, the Armenian side claimed that its forces had shot down 3 SU-25 warplanes and multiple UAVs of Azerbaijan. Dozens of Azerbaijani armoured vehicles and hundreds of troops were also allegedly eliminated. Nonetheless, photo and video evidence from the ground demonstrates that in fact Armenian forces are on retreat and are now trying to regroup and prevent further advances of Azerbaijan into the contested region.
Taking into account the current complex diplomatic situation in the region, the Azerbaijani military has all chances to continue its active offensive operations until the start of winter. After this, Baku will likely temporarily halt the military phase of its push to capture Karabakh and return to the negotiating table to force Armenia to surrender the region. If this does not happen, the Azerbaijani advance will likely be resumed in the spring of 2021.
Those beheadings and civilian population shellings aren’t pointless atrocities; they have a very clear purpose. Again, one I have predicted right from the start in this response column: the idea is to terrify the civilian population and all defenders except the truly committed, and force it to flee. This is also exactly the tactic used by ISIS in its 2013-15 advances in Iraq and Syria. The Wahhabi headchoppers imported from Idlib, among whom there are probably several “ex”ISIS, by Sultan Erdogan know what they are supposed to do.
When the civilian population flees, the Pashinyan regime will surrender Nagorno Karabakh, blame Russia for its fall, exit the CSTO, and join NATO. The only way to stop this happening is for Russia to intervene now, and it has still shown no signs of wanting to.
And they’ll be right to blame Russia. It’ll be a betrayal and a weasel act on par with what you’d expect from from the apex of treacherous modus operandi of the British. It would actually worse than when Russia reneged on Iran’s S-300 after they paid for it.
But I don’t think what you’re proposing will happen. Russia will have fish or cut bait. How can Russia tolerate Islamist terrorists right in their underbelly? That was one of the main points of the Syria expedition wasn’t it. Somehow I think Erdogan is going to get a very bad surprise.
The whole agenda is just an orchestrated plot to entrap Russia in another conflict and instignate a clash btw. Armenis and Azaris also within Russia!
Another example of screwing the Cremlin establishment. What did the Russian secret services do? Blind or just the foreign ministry is incompetent and makes the army unable to respond and Putin look like an amateur chess player?!
And all this on the very doorstep of Russia, what more – inflamable Caucasus! Putin learned nothing from the Ukrainian lesson. Just unable or negligent or treasonous?!
Everything in the battle field is different from Iraq and Syria. Armenians are not Arabs or Indians. Bombings of cities is more a sign of desperation for Azerbaijan to make up for the lack of battlefield victories. They only started to Bomb Armenian populated cities after they failed in the battlefield. And it is normal for the population to flee, same thing happens with Azeri cities where population flees towards the Capital Baku. The Islamic extremists are maybe 1 or 2 thousand out of an attack g force of 120-150 thousand. Islamic fighters are a non-factor in this war.
Azerbaijan with all her modern weapons and overwhelming army(plus auxiliaries) lost several thousand Soldiers and gained %3.5 of Nagorno Karabakh territory. It seems hardly a success. First days of war Turkish and Azeri journalists were all over the front expecting quick victory. Now all the videos they have of the battle is drone video of bombing Armenian soldiers, and those videos almost have ended too. While Armenians have daily videos on the ground blowing up Azeri tanks and using direct artillery fire on Azeri troops. The motivated young Armenians boys have presented an impenetrable firewall that has stopped the Azeri-Turk-Zionist-Pakistani-Afghan-Jihadist alliance. Armenians were surprised in the beginning with the drone warfare but now they got so much newly received manpads and anti air missiles that Azeri drones don’t seem to have anymore effect on the battlefield.
If Russia would rush to intervene in any conflict NATO starts in its surrounding/sphere of influence, Russia would be already bankrupted and overstretched in its military might leaving the motherland with less resources with which to proetect herself.
All in all, due, as Margarita Symonian stated while asking Lavrov past day, sanctions will come whatever the behavior Russia takes, special operations teams to erase jihadi “airborne” forces could be deployed…
But beware this is not a NATO trap from both, Turkey, and Armenia elite in charge now…
When I visited Armenia, after the Pashynian “velvet revolution”, at least the young people working in tourism and cultural facilities expressed in somehow Russophobic terms, praising Pashynian all the way…
Concretely, for clearly Argentinian emigree guide at Yerevan History Museum, everything was the fault of the Russians, she passed us by without stopping at whole sections of the museum where I fear were explained old events of the Soviet era where the Russian could appear in a good light ( some glance when I delayed myself a bit to test so seemed to me…) One could summarize by saying that for that clearly Atlanticist guide, there were never anything called the Armenian Communist Party….of if anytime existed, must be condemned to ostracism….If Armenians are mainly Christians and even they are the most ancient Christians in the world, one find it difficult to believe that current regime and followers are really a majority there, taking into account that, as the very same Putin asured, communism includes many Christian values…
At least the Georgians, if not out of the determined will of the inhabitants of that city, keep the Stalin Museum at Gori as it was conceived ( except for a little kinda “secret” piece in a basement related to triangular letters and ruthless communist commisars our young guide took the time to show us, when, in contrast, tried to pass a at light velocity through the whole interesting museum full of historical documents and images…) , if not just out of pure economicist reasons, as it constitutes one of the best reasons for every communist around the world ( of which there are still a bunch by the concurrence…) to visit Georgia, along with its awesome mountainous landscapes, good cuisine and wines…without forgetting the proverbial courtesy of the Georgians, even when clearly in opposite ideological stances…
What happens in Armenia is that after the fall of the USSR, having an economy complementary to other Soviet republics, find itself now without good economic prospects, as the country does not produce almost nothing…In this scenarion of growing impoverishment, that it appears a figure promising riches if the country turns to the West can be hunting for at least the young who do not study the history of those countries under US/NATO vasallage…where the ancient saying of “bread for today, hunger fior tomorrow” find absolute sense as they find themselves immersed into unacabable crisis which arrive indefectibly each ten yearas when they lose whatever they could have gained during that past decade, and this is so non-stop as if they were hamsters running the noria….The benefits, of the hard works of every decade, the Armenians can be sure, run to another latitudes and to pockets the other side of the Atlantic
As illustration, matrioshka like play of traps….
https://www.voltairenet.org/article211170.html
Alas, as with many nations, Armenia suffers from the malady of metropolitan (neo)liberal youth and feminist women who are manipulated by Western-backed Zionist oligarchs concentrated in Yerevan and dominating the culture of the central city. It is true, they are all very disgustingly Russophobic, which is out-and-out racism as far as I’m concerned. This same phenomena is driving the attempt at color revolution in Minsk, which thankfully thus far has failed to succeed. This phenomena can also be observed frequently in major cities in Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg) and Iran (Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz) but fortunately such pro-Western elements are much, much weaker and unable to sway the opinions of the majority in their respective states.
This kind of thing always reminds me of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which was the most advanced economy of the Warsaw Pact states and had by the 1980s developed into a strong consumer-driven economy. Standards of living by then were very high (on par with average standard of living for working class in West Germany, even better in many respects), everyone was employed, and private enterprise was growing.
But the masses had been aggressively bombarded by Western propaganda, pop culture, and illusory notions of “freedom of speech.” As with the rest of the East Bloc and Yugoslavia, people were fooled. When the Wall finally came down with the consent and agreement of the GDR leaders (who foolishly thought their Western counterparts would respect the reunification agreements), what was supposed to be a “reunification” turned out to be an out-and-out annexation of GDR territory by the Federal Republic. All public and private enterprise was illegally taken over by West German and European corporations and conglomerates, almost everyone was forced into brutal unemployment and poverty, homelessness (which had been unheard of during the GDR era) actually became a thing, and thousands upon thousands of mostly Turkish immigrants were bussed into the former GDR states to take most of the blue collar jobs. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. To this day, the people and economy of East German states have not fully recovered and unemployment and poverty is still rampant and immigrants still get preference for many types of jobs, which has led to extreme anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment and violence since the early 1990s.
But the East Germans did get some “freedoms” in exchange: the freedom to engage in limitless pornography, homosexuality, transsexuality, drug abuse, alcoholism, neo-Nazi hooliganism, limitless Turkish and other foreign immigrants, American junk food, and more “freedom of speech” (except if you criticize Jews, Zionists, and/or Israel you’ll be arrested for antisemitism and prevented from ever being able to work for a living.)
Thus, the only conclusion I can come to regarding our good friend Pashinyan and his backers among the Armenian oligarchy actually want this conflict to escalate as it allows them to lay the blame for everything on Putin and Russia, and officially align with the US/EU/NATO, i.e. global Zionism. It is obvious by now that they are willing to sacrifice Artsakh to achieve this goal.
I can tell you that behind closed doors in the Iranian government, no one wants to see Artsakh destroyed, precisely for this reason, but also because if Artsakh collapses, without a doubt there will be ethnic cleansing of Armenians by Turkic hordes, and that is not acceptable to Iran. Assyrians, Armenians and other Christians were ethnically cleansed in Iranian Kurdistan and Iranian Azerbaijan in the late 1910s by the Ottomans, who illegally invaded Iranian territory in huge numbers (Iran under the corrupt Qajars did not have a proper standing army and thus the borders were not able to be defended) and were able to get many local Kurds and Azeris to help exterminate as many Iranian Christians as possible, all as part of some desperate and irrational scheme to save the Ottoman Empire from collapsing.
While there were enough ethnic Persians in those regions (Persians being a very small minority in Iranian Kurdistan and Azerbaijan, and Northern Iran in general) to protect some Christians, there weren’t enough Persian Cossack units to stand against the Ottomans and there was a mass exodus of Assyrians from the region and many left Iran entirely. Those who stayed in Iran mostly settled in Tehran and to a lesser extent Isfahan. For the first time in history, Assyrians, who had previously been a majority in their region for centuries, were fully ethnically cleansed. This event played one of the significant factors in the rise of Reza Shah, who had been the leader of the Russian-backed Persian Cossacks (which was a small semi-standing army, but based only in Northern Iran and spread fairly thin) in his drive to overthrow the Qajars and enforce the authority of the central government in Tehran across the country and begin building a modern standing army that would be able to successfully defend Iran’s borders from any future invasion.
Of course, today the Islamic Republic officially condemns Reza Shah and smears him as an apostate (he promoted state secularism, but privately remained a very religious Shia, otherwise he would have likely been willing to have anti-monarchist Shia clergy executed) and dictator, but most people in Iran know better and acknowledge that the positives of his reign far outweighed the negatives and his actions were necessary to fully transition Iran from feudalism to a modern nation-state.
It is interesting that Shia Muslim government leaders in Tehran care more about the fate of Christians in Artsakh than the nominally Christian leadership of Armenia who want to turn Yerevan into an effeminate Gay Pride capital modeled after Tel Aviv, which is, according to Israel, the gayest city in the world. I’ve never been there, but I can believe it.
It would be interesting to see a comment from Jamshyd or some other Iranian on what you mentioned.
I’ve never been to Tel Aviv either, but I too can believe it is the gayest city in the world.
Assuming this news is accurate, could this be the excuse Iran needs to more openly support Armenia against Azerbaijan?
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/azerbaijan-front-line/iran-upper-karabakh-war-missile-hits-east-azarbaijan/2007950
Perhaps Iranian & Russian leaders know Erdogan better than he knows himself, and thus they are patiently building their case against Turkey?
All i hear is anti-Russian this and that.
Hey maybe if Russia helped one of her allies they would be pro-Russian. Sentiments can change.
And all those millennials in Armenia would be pro-Russian for decades even teach their children to be like that.
What’s up, oh grand chessmaster Putin, didn’t think of that? Should i correct your policies and actions?
Without official Armenian request, Russia should not intervene on the battlefield. Even with request, I doubt Russia would lend its forces to keep formerly occupied Azeri territories. Thus, I am thankful if Russia and its government respects international law.
Warlords are the scum of the world. There is absolutely no need for another one.
Thank you Marcel!
At last the voice of reason here. Before this your comment, a few others here were truly cringeworthy.
For some reason those people are under impression that they are actually “contributing” something to discussion, when in fact what is being shown here is nothing more but ingrained attitudes. They don’t see that, unfortunately..