- Trigger warning: Contains descriptions of violence and death
It was the afternoon of 19 September on a late-summer school day for Gurgen that the carnage erupted with sudden ferocity. The seven-year-old had just returned from classes when explosions sounded in Sarnaghbyur, his small village in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus, known to Armenians as Artsakh.
Azerbaijan, which had blockaded Nagorno-Karabakh for over nine months, starving the 120,000 ethnic Armenian inhabitants, had launched a massive assault across the region, which lies just east of Armenia proper, within the official borders of Azerbaijan. After 100,000 people fled the attack, MEPs in the European Parliament have said the attack amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Garik Aleksanyan, the mayor of Sarnaghbyur, attempted to control the situation and prevent panic in the village, directing residents to what he thought was a safe place behind a hill in the hope of escaping the shelling from Azerbaijani positions a few kilometres away.
