“Everyone here volunteered during the war. Even men in their sixties,” said Vardan Hayrapetyan, sitting in the spartan office of his hotel in southern Armenia, near the Iranian border. The hotel mostly caters to Iranian truck drivers who shuttle gas and other goods along the main road through Syunik province, a relatively narrow strip of land that is bordered by Azerbaijani territory on two sides, east and west.
“Most of the men went to defend the border with Nakhichevan and the south of Karabakh,” Vardan added. “That’s where the battles were hardest.”
Nakhichevan is Azerbaijan’s exclave to the west of Armenia, while Nagorno-Karabakh is disputed territory to the east. For 44 days last autumn, Armenia fought a tooth-and-nail defence against Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, home to thousands of Armenians (and before a cataclysmic war in the 1990s, to many Azerbaijanis as well). On 27 September, Azerbaijani forces launched a full-scale military offensive in Karabakh, forcing civilians from their homes with artillery and ground forces, and overwhelming Armenian defences with the help of Turkish-made drones.
