Armenia Says Azerbaijani Raids Target Civilians

Armenians on Sunday accused Azerbaijan of staging two days of deadly air raids on civilian targets in Nagorno-Karabakh, including bomb attacks on a church and a dormitory packed with refugees. The dormitory attack Saturday reportedly killed at least 13 people.

On Sunday morning, Sukhoi jets raided residential areas of Stepanakert and dropped bombs near an Armenian church, Christ the Savior, in nearby Shusha at the precise moment the Divine Liturgy was being said, Armenian sources said.

The Pro-Armenia news agency reported “significant destruction” in the two cities, the largest in the disputed Caucasus territory, but said that the number of dead and wounded in the latest aerial attacks was not immediately known.

Official Azerbaijani information sources were silent, but grisly videotape aired Sunday evening by Russian TV appeared to confirm the Armenian reports.

The footage showed bloodied Armenians hauling bodies from the dormitory and a severed leg lying in the street. Laundry fluttered from the building’s balconies.

Robert Kocharyan, chairman of the State Defense Committee of Nagorno-Karabakh, denounced the “criminal indifference of world opinion” toward the alleged Azerbaijani intention of killing and injuring as many Armenian civilians as possible.

Kocharyan said that Russia bears “a large measure of the responsibility” for allowing former Soviet military units to transfer or sell the most up-to-date military hardware to Azerbaijan.

In at least eight air raids Saturday, Sukhoi assault planes laden with 1,100-pound bombs braved defenders’ antiaircraft fire to attack a bazaar, a teachers’ training college where exams were being held and the five-story dormitory where Armenian refugee families fleeing the fighting were being housed, Armenian news agencies reported.

“It is obvious that the pilots intentionally are choosing places where the civilian population is concentrated,” Pro-Armenia charged.

Casualty tolls from the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict are often exaggerated and can vary wildly depending on the source, but by Sunday afternoon, the Armenian All-National Movement said the bodies of 13 people killed in Saturday’s aerial attacks had been pulled from the ruins.

At least 50 people were believed to have been wounded, the Armenian grass-roots political organization reported from Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.

Predominantly Christian Armenia and mostly Muslim Azerbaijan began overtly feuding in February, 1988, over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian enclave that is part of Azerbaijan.