YEREVAN: Fighting escalated sharply on Monday between Azerbaijan and its ethnic Armenian mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, and at least 29 people were killed in a second day of heavy clashes.

The two sides pounded each other with rockets and artillery in the fiercest explosion of the decades-old conflict in more than a quarter of a century.

Any move to all-out war could drag in major regional powers Russia and Turkey. Moscow has a defence alliance with Armenia, which provides vital support to the enclave and is its lifeline to the outside world, while Ankara backs its own ethnic Turkic kin in Azerbaijan.

“We haven’t seen anything like this since the ceasefire to the war in the 1990s. The fighting is taking place along all sections of the front line,” said Olesya Vartanyan, senior analyst for the South Caucasus region at Crisis Group.

Nagorno-Karabakh said 27 of its soldiers had been killed in fighting with Azeri forces on Monday, after saying that 31 of its servicemen had been killed on Sunday and around 200 wounded when Azerbaijan attacked.

Nagorno-Karabakh also said it had recovered some territory lost on Sunday.

The general prosecutor’s office in Azerbaijan said two Azeri civilians had been killed on Monday, after five were killed on Sunday, and 30 had been wounded. There was no official information about any Azeri military casualties.

Vartanyan said the use of rockets and artillery brought a higher risk of civilian casualties that could make the escalation hard to stop by diplomatic means: “If there are mass casualties, it will be extremely difficult to contain this fighting and we will definitely see a full-fledged war that will have a potential intervention of Turkey or Russia, or both of them.”

Russia called for an immediate ceasefire, and Turkey said it would support Azerbaijan.

Clashes first broke out in the late 1980s between Nagorno-Karabakh’s Arme­nian Christian majority and their ethnic Azeri neighbours, as Soviet Communist rule from Moscow was starting to crumble.

All-out war in the early 1990s led to hundreds of thousands of Azeris being driven out as the region, with heavy support from Armenia, threw off control from Baku and became self-governing. Hundreds of thousands more Armenians and Azeris were displaced from Azerbaijan and Armenia, respectively.

The new fighting has revived concern over stability in the South Caucasus, a corridor for pipelines carrying oil and gas to world markets.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan demanded Armenia immediately quit the Azeri lands he said it was occupying and said it was time to end the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis.

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2020