GORIS, Armenia — An explosion on Monday night at a fuel depot used by civilians fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh killed at least 20 people and left hundreds more injured.
In a statement, Gegham Stepanyan, the human rights defender of the unrecognized Karabakh Armenian administration, said that “the number of injured exceeds 200” and “the health condition of the majority is severe or extremely severe. The medical capacities of Nagorno-Karabakh are not enough.”
As part of an agreement with Azerbaijan, the Armenian Ministry of Health on Tuesday confirmed that a team of Armenian doctors had been given permission to fly in to Stepanakert to evacuate the wounded. Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani government says it has dispatched an ambulance containing burn dressings, sterile gloves, medicines and other essential supplies.
Local authorities were already struggling to cope with hundreds of people wounded after Azerbaijan launched a military offensive to capture the region last Tuesday, forcing its leadership to accept a Russian-mediated surrender agreement.
Footage posted by Siranush Sargsyan, a freelance journalist from the region’s de facto capital, Stepanakert, showed scenes of chaos in local hospitals, with patients suffering from severe burns and waiting for treatment.
“We don’t have any medical resources left that can help us,” one health care worker said in a desperate appeal to the camera. “We need to urgently evacuate our patients to specialized burn units in Yerevan,” she added.
The road to Armenia, however, is at a virtual standstill, deadlocked by a long line of cars, buses and trucks as civilians flee the isolated territory — inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders but controlled by its ethnic Armenian population since a war that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s.
Speaking to POLITICO on Monday, Azerbaijani foreign policy chief Hikmet Hajiyev said that one of the first steps toward “reintegration” of the Karabakh Armenians would be a joint emergency medical facility “with Armenian and Azerbaijani doctors working side by side.”
The two sides are meeting for talks on the future of the region in Brussels today.
