Azerbaijan announces the release of several cities

The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, announced the liberation of the town of Füzuli and seven other towns in the region of the same name occupied by Armenia, in a televised message to the nation.

"The Azerbaijani Army continues successfully the liberation of the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia. Today our army liberated the town of Füzuli and seven villages of the Füzuli region from the occupation", the president said.

The town of Füzuli, south of Nagorno-Karabakh, was occupied by Armenian forces on 23 August 1993 and has been under their control ever since.

"Well-known military experts considered that months of fighting were needed to liberate Füzuli and even doubted the success of the military operation, but in a very short time we managed to free the city and a large part of the region from the Armenian occupation," Aliyev stressed.

The Azerbaijani president described last night's Armenian ballistic rocket attack on a residential neighbourhood in Ganja, the country's second largest city, in which at least 13 people were killed and 52 injured, as a "war crime and a crime against humanity".

"If the world community does not want to punish them, we will punish the guilty ones. We will punish them on the battlefield, we will respond to them. We do not attack the civilian population," he stressed.

Aliyev said he would not stop military operations in the Nagorno-Karabakh area until Armenia leaves the seven Azerbaijani regions it has occupied since 1994.

"I have already said that if they do not leave themselves, we will throw them out like dogs. This is what we are doing. Every day, the brave Azerbaijani army releases new strategic high points, positions and important locations from the occupants," the president insisted.

Despite the fact that a week ago today Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed, with the mediation of Russia, a humanitarian ceasefire, the military actions that broke out on 27 September in the area of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have not ceased for a single day.

The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict dates back to Soviet times, when at the end of the 1980s the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was mainly inhabited by Armenians, asked to be incorporated into neighbouring Armenia, after which a war broke out that caused some 25,000 deaths.

At the end of the fighting, which lasted until 1994, Armenian forces took control of Nagorno-Karabakh and also occupied vast Azerbaijani territories, which they call the "security strip", in order to join it to Armenia.

Azerbaijan maintains that the solution to the conflict with Armenia necessarily involves the liberation of the occupied territories, a demand which has been backed by several UN Security Council resolutions.

For its part, Armenia supports the right to self-determination of Nagorno-Karabakh and advocates the participation of representatives of the separatist territory in negotiations on the settlement of the conflict.