BAKU, Azerbaijan, Jan. 15
Trend:
Despite all the pressures, all the phone calls, and all the threats, I said that we would go to the end and drive the enemy out of our lands, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said during a meeting with the servicemen in Shusha, Trend reports.
“The 44-day war of our glorious army is the war of the 21st century. We had prepared properly for this war, and we made no secret of that. I have said many times, including in my meetings with the military, that if the enemy does not leave our lands of its own free will, we will force them out of our lands. Force will play a role, and so it happened. Every single day of the 44-day war was a day of victory. Every day we moved forward. We did not drop back a single time. This is a very rare occasion in wars. There are attacks in wars, there are setbacks, there are maneuvers, but we were moving forward every day. Every week we liberated dozens of settlements from the occupiers. As a result, we liberated more than 300 settlements and Shusha by dealing crushing blows to the enemy. We forced them to withdraw their troops from Aghdam, Lachin, and Kalbajar districts in just 20 days. They were thrown out of our lands and we returned. From the day the war began, I was telling them to leave our lands and make a commitment. I was saying that the Armenian leadership should take this responsibility, that it should give us a timetable of when they would leave our lands, and I would have stopped the war. Otherwise, we will go to the end. Despite all the pressures, all the phone calls, and all the threats, I said that we would go to the end and drive the enemy out of our lands. We did that, we went all the way, we drove the enemy out and forced them to sign an act of capitulation on 10 November, thus ending the war,” the head of state said.