61 Reported Killed in Battles in Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh

Fighting raged in different parts of the Caucasus on Monday, with at least 60 people reported killed in one of the bloodiest battles in a longstanding territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

A spokesman for the Armenian mission in Moscow said that 45 Azerbaijanis and 15 Armenians had been killed over the weekend in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the south of the former Soviet Union.

Elsewhere in the Caucasus, one person was killed and several were wounded in the west Georgian town of Poti as government forces attacked loyalists of ousted Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a local official said.

Missiles flashed through the winter sky and machine-gun and artillery fire rocked the Black Sea port after the country’s ruling Military Council attacked near a bridge outside the town.

The fiercest assault on pro-Gamsakhurdia strongholds in four days was led by the troops of Jaba Ioseliani, co-chairman of the Military Council that drove the president from power.

The fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan took on the character of “a real war,” according to Russian television.

The Tass news agency, saying that fighting continued in the area around the village of Karin-Tak, reported that as many as 80 may have died in weekend combat.

About 1,000 people have been killed in nearly four years of fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh. But deaths have seldom been in double figures in sporadic battles for the mountainous enclave, surrounded by territory of Muslim Azerbaijan but populated mostly by Christian Armenians.

Karin-Tak is near the town of Shusha, the second-largest in Nagorno-Karabakh, about six miles from the capital of Stepanakert.

In Georgia, Poti Mayor Tengiz Baramidze said that one person had been killed and at least two were wounded.

Gamsakhurdia loyalists, heavily outnumbered and outgunned, crouched behind sandbags as government forces pounded their positions.