Azerbaijan urges international community to put pressure on Armenia to provide mine maps

By Ruslan Rehimov

BAKU, Azerbaijan (AA) - Azerbaijan urged the international community to exert pressure on Armenia on Thursday to provide mine maps.

"Armenia violated international law and committed a war crime by planting mines on Azerbaijani territories," Foreign Ministry spokesman Aykhan Hajizada told Anadolu.

Hajizada noted that Armenia provided maps to Azerbaijan following the Second Karabakh War because of international pressure.

"We have seen that only 25% of the information on these maps is accurate. Nearly 55% of recent explosions occurred in areas outside the maps provided by Armenia," he said.

Hajizada said the intentional placement of mines by Armenia on Azerbaijani lands in the past 30 years has become the most significant challenge and threat, complicating comprehensive reconstruction efforts in areas liberated from occupation after the Second Karabakh War on Nov. 10, 2020.

The situation is a hindrance to the activities of military personnel and civilians in the region, as well as to the peaceful return of displaced individuals to their ancestral homes, he noted.

Hajizada stressed that in the last 30 years, more than 3,400 Azerbaijanis have been injured or killed due to the explosion of mines planted by Armenia.

A total of 342 Azerbaijani citizens have fallen victim to landmines, while 65, including 50 civilians, were killed since the Second Karabakh War, he said.

Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been tense since 1991 when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions.

Azerbaijan liberated most of the region during the war in the fall of 2020, which ended with a Russian-brokered peace agreement, opening the door to normalization.

The Azerbaijani army initiated an anti-terrorism operation in Karabakh last September to establish constitutional order, after which illegal separatist forces in the region surrendered.

*Writing by Zehra Nur Duz