31 years on, horrors of Khojaly massacre still haunt Azerbaijanis

[Mujahid Memon]

Armenian occupation of Nagorno- Karabakh forced around one million Azerbaijanis to flee their homes until the region was liberated in the fall of 2020.​

On a bitterly cold night on February 26, 1992, Armenian troops and tanks rolled into the small town of Khojaly in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. What followed was one of the vilest pogroms on European soil since World War II – the massacre of 613 Azerbaijani civilians by Armenian soldiers.

This Sunday marks the 31st anniversary of what is now known as the Khojaly massacre – the darkest few hours in the history of Azerbaijan, a former Soviet vassal which declared independence a few months before the collapse of the USSR in December 1991.

Among those brutally murdered by Armenian forces were 106 women, 63 children and 70 older adults. Nearly 487 were seriously wounded when the town, with a population of about 7,000, was targeted with heavy artillery backed by tanks.

Rough estimates by Azerbaijan authorities and independent agencies put the number of ethnic- Azerbaijanis killed in the 1991-1994 war at over 30,000. Around one million others were forced out of their homes in the ethnic cleansing by Armenia.

After years of Armenian occupation, most parts of the Nagorno-Karabakh region were finally liberated by Azerbaijan forces in September 2020 after a 44-day conflict that ended in a Russia-brokered truce.

Armenian genocide

The killings – the single-largest massacre during the 1st Nagorno-Karabakh conflict – have drawn parallels with the horrors of the Holocaust.

Subsequent investigations by the Azerbaijani government and international experts, based on the testimonies of about 2,000 survivors, exposed the brutality of the Armenian soldiers.

Azerbaijani civilians were burnt alive, many had their scalps peeled off their scalps, some had their ears, noses or sexual organs cut off, and many had their eyes gouged off.

Survivors said Armenian soldiers stacked the bodies of women and children in piles and mutilated their victims in the worst ways imaginable.

About 150 of the 1,275 people that Armenians captured during the massacre remain missing to date. Eight families were completely wiped out, while 130 children lost one parent, and 25 lost both parents.

Some people from Khojaly, one of the oldest settlements in Karabakh, survived the massacre by escaping to surrounding hills and forests, eventually making their way to safety through sub-freezing temperatures.

READ MORE: Survivors recount horror of Khojaly massacre


“Armenia and its politicians occupied Azerbaijani lands for 30 years, caused 1 million people to live away from their homeland for 30 years, and carried out the Khojaly genocide with a fascist ideology,” Azerbaijan's ambassador to Türkiye Resad Mammadov said last year.

The Azerbaijani government has launched a Justice for Khojaly campaign, calling upon world leaders to recognise the massacre as a crime against humanity and to bring the perpetrators to justice.

READ MORE: A look back at the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict