BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec. 19
Trend:
Work is under way to create a Russian-Turkish monitoring center in Aghdam district. The establishment of the monitoring center is also part of the joint statement. It will monitor the situation, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said addressing a session of the Council of Heads of State of the Commonwealth of Independent States held in the format of a video conference, Trend reports.
“Regarding what is happening there now. There is no city of Aghdam. It is destroyed. Only one dilapidated mosque remains in the city of Aghdam. When we began to wonder why it was not destroyed like all the other mosques, it was said that it was a kind of reference point, so that if the Azerbaijani army launched an attack in this direction, they could give the artillery precise guidance on where to hit," Ilham Aliyev said.
"Foreign journalists who have visited the former city of Aghdam, or rather what is left of it, called it the Hiroshima of the Caucasus. I think it is worse than Hiroshima because Hiroshima is a nuclear tragedy, an atomic strike, but crowds of vandals and barbarians did not walk through it. In our case, the city of Aghdam was destroyed after the occupation – consciously and deliberately, just like the city of Fuzuli. When we liberated it, I ordered to raise the Azerbaijani flag on one of the buildings, but they told me that there was not a single building left, not a single building in a huge city where thousands, tens of thousands of people used to live. Everything has been razed to the ground. This is a war crime. Not only cities, but also all the villages have been razed to the ground. This is a situation the world has probably not seen over the past centuries," said the president.
"The same applied to the city of Jabrayil. It is not there either. In the cities where illegal settlements were carried out, some buildings remained, especially in Kalbajar district, the city of Kalbajar. But they were burned and destroyed by Armenian representatives in the 20- or 15-day period during which they were supposed to leave - from 10 November to 1 December. They destroyed houses, the houses they didn’t build. They had moved into the houses of the Azerbaijanis. They burned them, took out everything, cut down trees, the trees they could not take away to sell, they left them on the road. They burned forests. Therefore, this vandalism, unfortunately, continued to this day,” the head of state said.