Turkish Proxies Commit War Crimes Vs Armenians // FAI ONLINE

Azeri soldiers look on as an Armenian homes burns in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh (via @ONC3X on Twitter).

Azeri soldiers have been documenting their war crimes against Armenian civilians in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, with dozens of videos surfacing on social media platforms such as Telegram. Azerbaijan invaded the unrecognized autonomous region on September 27 with the support of the Islamist government of Turkey. Russia and Iran backed the Armenians in a brutal conflict that continued until Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Erdogan reached an agreement for ceasefire on November 9. Azeri forces currently occupy about half of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the region’s second largest city of Shushi. Azerbaijan will receive much of the territory it currently occupies by December as part of the peace agreement, a decision which sparked outrage in Armenia and has led to near-daily street protests in the capital of Yerivan against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan for what is now widely viewed to be an Armenian defeat. Both Turkish and Russian forces are being deployed to the conflict zone.

Although both sides in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have accused the other of war crimes, photographic evidence of Azeri war crimes in particular has mounted in the intervening three weeks since the end of hostilities, including recent videos showing captured Armenian combatants, both men and women, being physically abused and summarily executed by Azeri fighters. Other videos show the mutilated and decapitated bodies of Armenian soldiers lying in fields and roads. Armenian civilians in Azeri-occupied territories have been ordered to leave and return to Armenia in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, with Azeri fighters posting videos of themselves looting and ransacking empty homes. Several more videos show Armenian-owned houses on fire, suggesting that their former occupants chose to burn their homes and belongings before they fled, rather than allow the Azeris to take them as spoils. One video shows an elderly Armenian man on the floor of his home, surrounded by Azeri soldiers. For his refusal to return to Armenia, one of the Azeris cuts off his ear and leaves him crying in pain, face down in a pool of his own blood.

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The disturbing new evidence of Azeri war crimes against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh follows the same pattern of war crimes against Kurdish civilians in Northern Syria. After Turkish-backed Syrian jihadists invaded the Afrin region of Syria in 2018, followed by the Tel Abyad/Ras al-Ayn region the following year, eyewitness reports and evidence of similar crimes were also published on various media platforms, often by the perpetrators themselves. In both Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, the occupying forces were backed by the Islamist government of Turkey in committing violence against ethnic and religious minority groups which have been persecuted by various Turkish regimes for over a century.

We appeal to the FAI family to be in prayer for the Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh today. We pray for the evidence of violence and inhumane treatment to be exposed and to create awareness and indignation across the world. We pray for concerned governments to place immediate pressure on Turkey and Azerbaijan in order to restrain such crimes from continuing, and we pray for the Lord of the Harvest to open fields for his laborers to work in both Azerbaijan and Armenia as a result of the conflict, that the Good News of the Prince of Peace might be proclaimed to all.

Maranatha.