Azerbaijan Demonstrates How Not to Fight a War : Ethnic strife: Divided loyalties, lack of arms plague soldiers battling Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Looking resigned to the work, an Azerbaijani pilot sat in his cockpit with a weary smile Saturday as a crowd stormed his MI-8 Aeroflot helicopter for another terrifying flight into the Armenian-controlled hills of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Civilians fought soldiers for places aboard, prying open windows to dive in head first. Old men carried bundles of food, a boy carried his pet canary and the soldiers struggled to fit in a long heavy machine gun with a homemade stand.

“If the weapons don’t get on, the flight doesn’t go,” shouted an exasperated military man, handing up an assortment of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades. A grandmother shouted back through the ice-cold wash of the helicopter rotors: “A curse on you all. Where are you taking the world?”

For a principal staging post in one of the most threatening ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union, the scene at Agdam airfield 200 miles west of Baku, the Azerbaijan capital, seemed to be a textbook example of how not to fight a war.

Military supplies appeared to be minimal. Soldiers owe allegiance to different forces in the increasingly divided factions of Azerbaijan politics. Local commanders were seething about the high command back in Baku.

“Why don’t they give us any guns?” asked an Azerbaijani district commander. He downed glass after glass of vodka during a speech in the airfield’s shack-like restaurant, then jumped aboard a helicopter bound for one of more than a dozen Azerbaijani towns encircled by Armenian guerrillas in the hills of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The military disarray could not have happened at a worse time for Azerbaijan, coming just after the withdrawal of the last of Moscow’s peacekeeping forces from the troubled enclave.

At least 1,000 people have died in four years of conflict between Nagorno-Karabakh’s dominant population of Armenian Christians, who want independence or union with Armenia, and Azerbaijan, a Muslim republic that encloses the enclave and opposes the Armenian aspirations.

Much of the military disarray here results from a growing internal conflict back in Baku between forces loyal to President Ayaz Mutalibov, the republic’s well-entrenched former Communist leader, and elements in the opposition Popular Front, whose nationalist gunmen form the backbone of fighting forces in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Like Ukraine, all sides in Azerbaijan want an independent military force to fight the Armenian guerrillas in the enclave, a hilly area that makes up about one-eighth of Azerbaijan and has a population of about 160,000 today.

But the Azerbaijanis cannot agree on even the name of the army they started to form in December. Some in the Popular Front call it the National Defense Army and want it to expand. President Mutalibov calls it the National Guard and wants it to be restricted to border defense duties until a real army can be formed.

The style of fighting favored by the 2,000-to-3,000-member volunteer force was visible at the front outside Agdam. An Azerbaijani outpost was carpeted in shell casings from nightly exchanges of fire with Armenians 900 yards up the road. There have been few casualties.

“They waste ammunition, there is no discipline. It is hot-headed to just take patriotic people and then send them straight to the front,” Mutalibov said in an interview. “We are forming proper units that can fight like the army, and when we attack something we should be able to hold it, to eliminate the Armenian terrorists and not give it up straight away. We should not just shell places, which can hit civilians and get the use of propaganda against us.”

Mutalibov said his priority is to cut off enemy helicopter supply lines from nearby Armenia to the enclave as a first stage in a campaign to oust the Armenian guerrillas, who Azerbaijan says are not native to the area and are extensively armed and financed from abroad.

Mutalibov says he is unable to buy much-needed weapons from Russia or other countries, a bad handicap for Azerbaijan despite its advantage of a population of 7 million contrasted with Armenia’s 3 million.

Meanwhile, the president faces growing popular sentiment in Azerbaijan that the only way to end the conflict is to drive all Armenians out of the enclave. Many senior officials in both the government and the opposition Popular Front already believe that all-out war is inevitable once Azerbaijan has readied its forces.

“Blood will flow. But they won’t win. This is our land and our grandfathers’ land. They must go,” said Kharoman Abbasova, a former Communist and now deputy mayor of Agdam.

“We may not have guns, but we will march there and get rid of them with our fists,” said a middle-aged man in Baku.

“This is not a fight between Christians and Muslims. There are many Georgian and Russian Christians living in Azerbaijan,” said Faik Husseinov, a professor of English at Baku State University. “It is as if the Armenians in Los Angeles have declared themselves part of Armenia. This is a war about land.”

Just as Armenians passionately believe that Nagorno-Karabakh is theirs by virtue of being a majority there, Azerbaijanis argue that the land is theirs because Armenian settlers began arriving only in the 1820s, under Russian patronage. The Soviet Union granted the area autonomy within Azerbaijan in 1923. Now Azerbaijan has unilaterally annulled that autonomy in the face of Armenian demands for independence.

The last major attempt at a cease-fire, in October, collapsed in November when a helicopter carrying cease-fire observers crashed, killing 23 high-ranking officials from Azerbaijan and other republics. Azerbaijan says Armenian gunmen shot it down, but the Armenians say it crashed in a fog.

Now there is no substantial peace initiative under way, although 30 Armenian and Azerbaijani intellectuals met in a border province last week in a first attempt in four years to break the ice.

“We wanted to show that there is a way of peace. It doesn’t have to be war. We are human on both sides,” said Leila Yunusova, an Azerbaijani opposition party leader and head of a delegation to the talks.

Such moderation is rare. The otherwise-intransigent mood in Azerbaijan is fanned by the presence of 250,000 Azerbaijanis forced out of their homes in Armenia in 1988, joining a similar number that Azerbaijani officials say were forced out in the past three decades.

No spirit of reconciliation was evident at a school dormitory in Agdam that houses some of the 10,000 Azerbaijani refugees that officials say were expelled from their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh by Armenian gunmen in the last two months alone.

“They came in the night and started burning all the houses. We had to run away with what we could carry in our hands,” said grandmother Guzel Eminova. Then she added--to fervent agreement from all crowded around her on the cramped hostel bed--”We have always lived with them; their town was just over the river. But we could never live with them again.”