September 27, 2024 marks four years since the 44-day Karabakh war. In response to regular Armenian provocations and to end the military occupation of Azerbaijan's Karabakh region, the Azerbaijani armed forces launched a large-scale military operation that resulted in a decisive victory within 44 days. During the six-week blitzkrieg, the Azerbaijani army liberated over 300 towns and villages held for 30 years under the disastrous occupation of Armenia, which was forced to sign an act of capitulation. Thus, due to the increasing armed provocations along the line of contact, the unsuccessful mediation efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group and Armenia's refusal to comply with the resolutions and decisions of international organizations to end the military occupation of Azerbaijani territories, the war between the two countries is not long in coming.
The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, one of the oldest and longest in the post-Soviet space, began in 1987, when ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan's Karabakh region, supported by Armenia, began calling for the region's annexation to Armenia. Mass forcible deportations of native Azerbaijanis from their ancestral lands in Armenia began in the fall of 1987, when about 300,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis were forced to leave their homelands in Armenia, with thousands of them dying or disappearing without a trace. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, tensions erupted into full-scale war, and by 1994, Armenia occupied Karabakh and seven neighboring regions of Azerbaijan, forcing an estimated one million Azerbaijanis to flee their historic homeland. From 1994 to 2020, Yerevan wants to hold on to the occupied territories by forcing Baku to accept the de facto situation on the ground in exchange for a peace agreement, while the latter is consistently preparing to take back its original territories. After the regime change in Armenia in 2018, hopes for a peaceful resolution of the conflict are high, as the new Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly referred to a “peace acceptable to all parties” in his first days in office. However, the subsequent inflammatory rhetoric and behavior, in particular his statement “Karabakh is Armenia, period” completely obstructs the peace process and undermines all efforts at negotiations. Shortly thereafter, the then Minister of Defense of Armenia, David Tonoyan, called for a “new war for new lands”.
In July 2020, Armenia carried out a large-scale military provocation on the border with Azerbaijan. The purpose of the provocation is to involve third parties in the conflict and to cause damage to the strategic infrastructure of Azerbaijan. In August 2020, the Armenians resorted to another military provocation by sending a sabotage group to Azerbaijan to commit terrorist acts. Speaking at the 75th session of the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2020, President Ilham Aliyev addressed the international community: “We call on the UN and the international community to deter Armenia from further military aggression. The responsibility for the provocations and the escalation of tension lies entirely with the military-political leadership of Armenia.
On September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan launched a counteroffensive in response to yet another large-scale military attack by Armenia against Azerbaijani army positions and civilian settlements. The counteroffensive operation would later lead to the 44-day Patriotic War. After the liberation of the city of Shusha on November 8, 2020, Armenia has no choice but to sign an act of surrender on November 10, 2020.
The Patriotic War also earned the title “war of the 21st century” in world military science. In the face of the complex fortifications built by the Armenian army in hard-to-reach terrain for decades, the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan demonstrated high professionalism and military skills with modern and high-precision weapons. The liberation of the Motherland cost the lives of more than 3,000 Azerbaijani soldiers who died in the 44-day Patriotic War, which gives reason to declare September 27, the first day of the Patriotic War, as the Day of Remembrance in Azerbaijan.