Thousands of Armenian Christians have fled their ancestral homeland in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh over the weekend and more are expected, the government of Armenia confirmed on September 25. “The mass exodus has begun,” Siobhan Nash-Marshall, a U.S. – based human rights advocate who has been speaking to witnesses on the ground, told CNA.
Nash-Marshall founded the Christians in Need Foundation (CINF) in 2011 to help Armenian Christians in the region, and in 2020 she started a school for children and adults in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Now, Nash-Marshall has received word from her school in Nagorno-Karabakh that “all is over” and that “people from all regions, all villages, are home-less” and without shelter, food, and water.
Hundreds of ethnic Armenians are sleeping in the streets and cannot even drink water because they claim it has been “poisoned by Azeris,” according to Nash-Marshall’s contacts.
Both former soviet territories, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh for decades. With the backing of Turkey, Azerbaijan asserted its military dominance over Armenia in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, which ended in November 2020.
Though Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, is inter-nationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, the region is almost entirely made up of ethnic Armenian Christians.
Until last week, Armenians in the region claimed self-sovereignty under the auspices of the “Republic of Artsakh.”
On Sept. 19, Azerbaijan launched a short but intense military offensive that included rocket and mortar fire. The offensive, labeled “antiterror measures” by the Azeri government, resulted in the deaths of more than 200 ethnic Armenians and over 10,000 dis-placed civilians, according to the Artsakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs.