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Sunday, April 3, 2016

Nagorno-Karabakh Fighting - Azerbaijan announces unilateral cease-fire against Nagorno-Karabakh Sunday April 03,2016

Azerbaijan has announced a "unilateral ceasefire" in fighting with Armenian forces over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

A defence ministry spokesman said the Azeris were acting in response to international calls to halt violence.

But the Armenia-backed Karabakh forces said this was false and Azerbaijan was continuing to fire shells.

Nagorno-Karabakh has been in the hands of ethnic-Armenian separatists since a war that ended in 1994.

Fighting had continued into Sunday April 03,2016, after clashes left 30 soldiers dead and caused civilian casualties.

On Saturday  April 02,2016 Armenia said 18 ethnic-Armenian troops had died, while Azerbaijan said it had lost 12 troops.

There were also civilian casualties. The Karabakh defence ministry said a 12-year-old boy had been killed and two other children injured.

Note

Fighting between the two sides began in the late 1980s and escalated into full-scale war in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, killing about 30,000 people before a ceasefire in 1994.

The region, which lies inside Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians, has since run its own affairs with Armenian military and financial backing, but clashes break out on a regular basis.

The conflict has roots dating back over a century to competition between Christian Armenian and Muslim Turkic and Persian influences

Frictions exploded into violence when the region's parliament voted to join Armenia in the late 1980s

The ethnic Azeri population - about 25% of the total before the war - fled Karabakh and Armenia while ethnic Armenians fled the rest of Azerbaijan

Russian-brokered ceasefire signed in 1994, leaving Karabakh and swathes of Azeri territory around the enclave in Armenian hands




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