Mass exodus makes help more difficult
Tank farm explosion in Nagorno-Karabakh – agency reports 125 dead
September 26, 2023, 8:35 p.m
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125 instead of 20 dead: The Armenian Ministry of Health has significantly increased the number of victims after the explosion at a fuel depot in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The cause is still unclear, but the flight of tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians is not making rescue work any easier.
According to media reports, 125 people died in the explosion of a fuel depot in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Caucasus. The Interfax Azerbaijan news agency cited the Armenian Ministry of Health in the evening. The bodies were brought to Armenia, it said. The local authorities initially spoke of 20 dead and 290 injured after Monday’s incident.
The cause of the explosion remains unclear. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced the delivery of medicines to Nagorno-Karabakh. According to the ICRC, overcrowded hospitals and traffic jams caused by the flight of ethnic Armenians pose a problem. Many people are currently leaving Nagorno-Karabakh – mostly in cars and buses.
More than 28,100 Armenians on the run
On Monday, the leadership of the enclave in Azerbaijan announced that anyone who wanted to travel to Armenia after Azerbaijan’s military operation last week could do so. There are traffic jams on the roads leading from Nagorno-Karabakh, which lies in the middle of Azerbaijan, to Armenia. The authorities of the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh said that free fuel would be provided to those who wanted to leave.
According to the government in Armenia, more than 28,100 of the 120,000 ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh have now arrived there. This is the status as of today, Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. CEST, she announced in the evening. Nine hours earlier there were around 13,550 people who had entered Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh.
Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan under international law, but is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Armenians, who largely controlled the region for three decades with the help of the Armenian government. Azerbaijan’s military attacked the area on Tuesday last week. A day later, the ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh agreed to a ceasefire out of necessity.