Azerbaijani Attack Kills 50 in Karabakh

Heavily armed Azerbaijani troops launched an attack on the Armenian village of Maraga in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region this weekend, killing more than 50 Armenians, Armenian officials reported Saturday.

“They mercilessly and brutally shot dozens of civilians--women and children among them,” said Levon Zhurdyan, spokesman for Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan.

Azerbaijani officials reported that 10 of their soldiers died in the fighting near Maraga and that casualties among civilians were very high in the Azerbaijani village of Gajar, which Armenian troops captured Saturday.

“That’s the third Azerbaijani village they’ve captured in two weeks,” Niyazi Ibragimov, deputy chairman of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, said.

Heavy fighting was also reported in other villages in Nagorno-Karabakh, a remote mountainous enclave of Azerbaijan populated primarily by Armenians, and in villages near the border between the two republics. The city of Stepanakert, the enclave’s center, was under constant shelling from the Azerbaijani stronghold of Shusha, Armenian officials said.

While Armenian officials described the fighting in Maraga on Friday night and Saturday as a bloody attack by at least 1,000 Azerbaijani soldiers with 20 armored personnel carriers, Ibragimov called it “a courageous counteroffensive.”

The bloody weekend followed a relative lull in the warfare between peoples of the two former Soviet republics that resulted from a cease-fire brokered by Iran three weeks ago. The intractable conflict, which has raged for four years and claimed as many as 2,000 lives, presents a formidable challenge to the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose alliance that replaced the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan and Armenia are members of the Commonwealth.

Both Azerbaijani and Armenian officials said that deaths among their civilian populations this weekend were higher than usual because they were caught off guard by the attacks and had not evacuated residents of villages as is their normal practice.

“Now we are getting ready for a large-scale offensive by the Azerbaijani army, which has used the cease-fire to regroup and strengthen its forces,” Ruben Sugaryan, an assistant to the Armenian president, said in a telephone interview from Yerevan, the Armenian capital. “Large columns of armored vehicles were sighted by our intelligence near the (Azerbaijani) town of Agdam, close to Karabakh,” he said.

Azerbaijani officials said, however, that renewed full-scale fighting began Wednesday when Armenian troops with six armored vehicles and two tanks captured the village of Agaban, just outside Nagorno-Karabakh. At least 33 people were killed and 100 are missing, Ibragimov said.

“After the massacre, the Armenian attackers burned what was left of the village to the ground and then retreated,” he added.

Sergei Loiko, a researcher in The Times’ Moscow bureau, contributed to this report.