Armenians Reportedly Burn String of Azerbaijan Villages : Caucasus: Tens of thousands have fled across a perilous river into Iran, aid workers and refugees say.

Armenian troops pushing deeper into Azerbaijan have burned a string of villages and captured a major town in recent days, forcing tens of thousands of people across the treacherous Araks River into Iran, relief workers and refugees said Sunday.

The eastward offensive, which began about a week ago, marks the resumption of a six-month campaign to expand Armenian control of the mountainous terrain surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh. That Armenian-populated enclave inside Azerbaijan is now under Armenian control after 5 1/2 years of ethnic warfare.

Armenians say the offensive is aimed at clearing away Azerbaijani artillery that might threaten the enclave. But civilians in the path of the war testify that the advancing troops have opened fire on them and torched their modest rural homes.

“The Armenians were shelling us as we were waiting to cross the river,” said a 12-year-old refugee who was separated from his parents in the exodus and identified himself only as Galid. “I was very scared. I saw several children my age swept away by the current.”

Galid is one of 25,000 refugees who have crossed into Iran in recent days, boarded trucks and been shuttled eastward and back across the border to a refugee tent city near Imishli, in a safer part of Azerbaijan. Relief agencies say an additional 40,000 refugees are on the way here at a rate of 5,000 per day.

The latest offensive brings to nearly 300,000 the number of Azerbaijanis chased from their homes since Karabakh Armenian defense forces broke out of their enclave and began seizing territory to the west, south and east. Azerbaijan and Iran contend that the Armenian army has joined the offensive, which has grabbed about 20% of Azerbaijan’s territory.

On Friday, Armenian units captured Zangelan, the last major town in southwestern Azerbaijan’s highlands that had been controlled by the dispirited Azerbaijani army. Other units pushed the battlefront eastward along the Araks into Azerbaijan’s southeastern lowlands to a point 70 miles downstream from the Armenian border.

Octay Rustamov, a 35-year-old native of Zangelan, fled as the Armenians arrived. After crossing the river, he said, “I looked back and saw my hometown burning in the distance.”

Widespread arson by the Armenians was confirmed by Mahmoud Said, chief of the U.N. mission in Azerbaijan, who drove 20 miles along the river on the Iranian side Friday and Saturday.

“The Azerbaijani side of the border was in flames,” he said. Along that whole stretch of riverbank, “we could see entire villages burning just 500 meters from the barbed wire.”

The offensive has upset a round of peace efforts that intensified after three-way talks in Moscow among the presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia in early October. But it has attracted little outside attention, in part because of a recent flare-up of civil war in neighboring Georgia that prompted Georgian leader Eduard A. Shevardnadze to seek and get Russian military intervention.

Azerbaijani President Geidar Aliyev has also asked the Russian army to help stop the Armenian offensive, but Moscow has so far offered only diplomacy.

Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, worried about the violence along the border, brokered his own cease-fire during a visit to Azerbaijan last week, but it quickly broke down. Iran has mounted a major relief effort on Azerbaijani soil, with assistance from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Oxfam and other relief agencies.

On Friday, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey called for an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the offensive. Azerbaijan charged that 60,000 of its people were cut off from the rest of the country and faced “the threat of being annihilated by bombardment from Armenian artillery and armored units.”

Armenia responded that the offensive being carried out by the Karabakh defense forces was of a “purely reciprocal nature” and aimed at neutralizing movements of Azerbaijani troops violating the cease-fire.

By all evidence here, however, the Azerbaijani army is in full retreat. Azerbaijani television Saturday showed a Cabinet official, Leila Gadjieva, visiting the battle front and criticizing soldiers for their hasty withdrawal from Zangelan. She said they allowed the Armenians to seize “enough ammunition for five wars.”