Azerbaijan Fighting Erupts With New Intensity : Nagorno-Karabakh: Government troops press an offensive against Armenian militants in the enclave.

Village-to-village fighting and heavy shelling of the capital racked the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh on Saturday in a radical new escalation of warfare that has already cost more than 1,000 lives in the Caucasus Mountains enclave.

Armenian and Azerbaijani militants grappled for control of several villages seen as key tactical positions on Nagorno-Karabakh’s border with Azerbaijan, and scores of rockets rained down on the capital of Stepanakert, according to reports from the region.

Dozens of people have been reported killed since Friday--more than 100, according to the Azerbaijani news agency Assa-Irada--and an estimated 60 people died in similar fighting last weekend.

In an apparent bid to bring back the old Soviet--now Commonwealth--troops that were withdrawn from the region in December, leaving a vacuum that opened the way for the new clashes, the chairman of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Parliament flew to Moscow on Saturday to appeal to the Russian leadership and the army.

“The conflict has entered a qualitatively new stage in the military sense,” said Armen Baibursyan, an Armenian parliamentary official from Armenia’s capital of Yerevan.

Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of Azerbaijan populated mainly by Armenians who want to secede, has proved the most intractable and violent of the old Soviet Union’s ethnic conflicts during nearly four years of fighting.

Armenian officials have appealed repeatedly in recent days for international peacekeeping troops to stop the bloodshed in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Even the Russian Foreign Ministry, openly disturbed by the prospect of a full-fledged war near Russia’s southern border, has said it would welcome international peace initiatives, and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin on Friday endorsed the idea of bringing in U.N. troops.

Baibursyan said that Azerbaijani troops were attacking on Friday and Saturday in groups of up to 400 soldiers--far more than before--backed by armored personnel carriers and even some tanks. They have also begun to use artillery more sophisticated than the Alazan rocket, used in civilian life to break up hail clouds, that has been a staple of the conflict, he said.

The Azerbaijani attacks on villages in Nagorno-Karabakh’s Askeran region were apparently aimed at opening a corridor from which troops could launch an assault on Stepanakert, the Interfax news agency reported. Azerbaijani reports said that Armenians were bombarding Shusha, an Azerbaijani stronghold near Stepanakert, and the city of Agdam, which lies just over the border in Azerbaijan proper.

Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan told the newspaper Izvestia in an interview published Saturday that “constant armed attacks on Armenian villages are being staged with the goal of forcing their residents to take refuge in Armenia, and the region is totally blockaded for the fourth year in a row. I can’t say how this will end.”

Azerbaijanis maintain that they act only defensively in the region, trying to liquidate bases of Armenian irregulars. The Azerbaijani foreign minister said this weekend’s operations were not an offensive but an attempt to take out “Armenian terrorist groups in the villages.”

The battles appeared to have been spurred in part by Azerbaijani anger over a helicopter crash earlier in the week that killed about 40 of their compatriots. Azerbaijan accuses Armenia of shooting down the helicopter with a heat-seeking missile; Armenia denies the accusation.

Azerbaijani rhetoric heated up considerably in the wake of the helicopter incident, with the republic’s President Ayaz Mutalibov vowing that “we must gather everything we have in a single, strongly clenched fist.”

The current conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh began in late February, 1988, when the enclave, whose population of about 180,000 is nearly 80% Armenian, tried to remove itself from Azerbaijani administration and join Armenia.

The turmoil that followed led to massacres of Armenians living in Azerbaijani cities and to direct Armenian-Azerbaijani warfare in Nagorno-Karabakh itself.

Although peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, brokered by Russia and Kazakhstan, got under way in September, they have limped along with little result and were dealt a heavy blow in November when peace negotiators were killed in a helicopter crash similar to the recent one.

Ironically, the political developments that allowed Armenia and Azerbaijan to claim their full independence from the former Soviet Union appear to have worsened the prospect for peace in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Formerly, the Soviet Union deployed 5,000 troops in the region to try to keep the peace there. Now, those troops have been withdrawn except for a small detachment in Stepanakert. The new Commonwealth of Independent States has largely refused to take action in the conflict, and Yeltsin says he sees no reason why more “Russian boys” should die there.

Moreover, under the Commonwealth’s military agreements, Azerbaijan and Armenia have the right to field their own national armies. Azerbaijan has been actively developing its own military force.

Baibursyan said that Armenia would not offer its own official military support to Armenian militants within Nagorno-Karabakh, because the Yerevan government fears that would lead to all-out warfare with Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijani fighters, in contrast, are reported now to be mainly soldiers of the regular Azerbaijani army.

A duty officer at the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry who answered the phone in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, said Saturday that he could not answer questions and that all of his superiors were unavailable.

They were all “in the field,” he said.