Azerbaijan’s president has raised the nationwide flag over the capital of the previous breakaway area of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Azerbaijan retook the territory final month in a 24-hour lightning army offensive, prompting the overwhelming majority of its ethnic Armenian inhabitants to flee.
President Ilham Aliyev was pictured elevating his nation’s flag over the capital, which was referred to as Khankendi by Azerbaijan and as Stepanakert by Armenians.
He additionally delivered a speech, his presidential workplace mentioned.
Most of the territory’s inhabitants of 120,000 ethnic Armenians have now fled to Armenia, many fearing persecution – though Azerbaijan had pledged to respect their rights.
Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, claimed the large-scale evacuation amounted to “a direct act of an ethnic cleansing and depriving people of their motherland”.
But Azerbaijan has rejected the accusation, arguing the mass migration by the area’s residents was “their personal and individual decision and has nothing to do with forced relocation”.
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The Karabakh area is internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory.
It turned a breakaway state underneath the management of ethnic Armenian forces in 1994 after six years of separatist combating following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 2020 Azerbaijan took again elements of the area in a 44-day battle, with the rest reclaimed in September’s offensive.
Source: information.sky.com”