Syria denounces the presence of Turkish terrorists in Azerbaijan

The sending of Turkish militias to the Caucasian country of Azerbaijan has been doubly confirmed. First by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) and now by Syrian President Bachar al-Asad. 

The Syrian leader has assured this Tuesday that Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is the "main instigator" of the recent war spiral in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, whose sovereignty is disputed by Armenia and Azerbaijan.

"Erdogan supports the terrorists in Syria and Libya and was the main instigator of the recently erupted conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Azerbaijan and Armenia", the Syrian president said in an interview with the Russian news agency Sputnik.

Al-Asad has pointed out that Turkey has employed "terrorists from various countries" in Syria and has applied the same methods in Libya, "where it employed terrorists from Syria and perhaps other countries as well".

The international concern for the militia movements in Turkey has increased, especially after the big offensive that the Azeri army is conducting against Azerbaijan. The recovery of the territories of Nagorno-Karabakh is under way and, since 26 September last, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has declared that "they will not stop until the Armenian occupation is withdrawn".

The president of Syria has also charged the major powers of the international community that support Turkey, considering them to be "accomplices" of Ankara. "Turkey is a tool for these countries to impose their policy on the region and to realize their aspirations", he said. 

For its part, on Tuesday the Armenian Foreign Ministry called for an immediate ceasefire in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, whose sovereignty is disputed with Azerbaijan, while rejecting attempts to resolve the conflict by military means.

Since the beginning of the fighting, the Armenian army has been losing the positions it won in the 1994 war, when the Nagorno-Karabakh region proclaimed itself independent and surrounded the western border of this area, invading 20 percent of Azeri territory.

Armenia calls for a ceasefire while stressing that there will be no peaceful settlement. "We stress once again that there is no alternative to a peaceful settlement to the conflict and the peace process," the Armenian government department said in a statement. 

The Armenian Foreign Ministry welcomed the statement of the foreign ministers of the countries of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE), who condemned the attacks on the civilian population in Nagorno-Karabakh and said they posed a threat to regional security.

For its part, the Unified Information Centre of the Government of Armenia has reported that more than 3,400 members of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces have been killed in the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh since the end of September.

In a brief message posted on its Facebook social network account, it indicated that the Azerbaijani armed forces had also lost 17 aircraft, 16 helicopters, 126 drones, 379 armoured vehicles and tanks, and four mobile rocket launching systems.

In this context, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced that the head of the department, Mevlut Çavusoglu, will travel this Tuesday to Azerbaijan to discuss the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh in a meeting with the president of the country, Ilham Aliyev.

Çavusoglu was welcomed on his arrival by his Azeri counterpart, Ceyhun Bairamov, and met with Aliyev, according to the official agency APA. Turkey has become Azerbaijan's main ally in the conflict to the extent that Armenia and Syria have denounced that it would be offering military support to the Azeri forces, something that was denied by both Baku and Ankara.

The tension in Nagorno-Karabakh has continued since the beginning of a spiral of war that has claimed the lives of dozens of Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers in combat in this region whose sovereignty has been disputed by the two countries for decades.

The former Soviet autonomous province attempted to gain independence from Azerbaijan for the first time in 1988, which led to serious ethnic clashes in the region. More than a million civilians fled their homes and thousands of people died in the conflict until a ceasefire was reached in 1994, with Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh forces holding sway over most of the province and several neighbouring districts of Azerbaijan.