May 2017: Soldiers of Nagorno Karabakh army make a patrol close to Martakert frontline, less than 300 meters of the Azerbaijan army positions. (c) NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Twenty-three years after Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a ceasefire deal that ended a bloody war over Nagorno-Karabakh, a steady drumbeat of armed escalation is making a return to large-scale violent conflict more likely than ever before.
Last April, a four-day flare-up killed at least 200 people. Further skirmishes continue to inflict casualties along the Line of Contact (LoC), the 200km frontline which separates Armenian and Azerbaijani forces. Both sides intermittently employ heavy artillery and anti-tank weapons against each other. In May this year, there were reports of self-guided rockets and missiles falling near densely populated areas. On 4 July, a two-year-old girl and her grandmother in the Azerbaijani village of Alkhanli were killed.
Years of military build-up have been propelled in Azerbaijan by oil and gas windfall and in economically weaker Armenia by Russia’s preferential prices of weaponry. Alongside highly-mobilised, bellicose societies on both sides, these developments risk escalating tensions into an unprecedented larger-scale conflict. The fallout of a headlong collision would likely cause immeasurable destruction and exact an enormous civilian casualty toll far worse than April’s flare-up. Such developments could even prompt the intervention of regional powers Russia and Turkey, who have defence commitments with Armenia and Azerbaijan, respectively.
