Azerbaijani Pre\u00adsident Ilham Aliyev on Sunday raised the national flag in the capital of the former breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh \u2014 known as Khankendi by Azerbaijan and as Stepanakert by Armenians \u2014 after a lightning military operation last month brought the territory back under Baku\u2019s control. President Aliyev said he had achieved a decades-long \u201cdream of Azerbaijani people\u201d by taking control of Nagorno-Karabakh from ethnic Armenia separatists. \u201cWe achieved what we wanted. We fulfilled the dream the Azerbaijani people have lived with for decades,\u201d he said in a speech in Karabakh\u2019s main city. The capital fell to Azerbaijan after security forces crushed ethnic Armenian fighters, prom\u00adpting most of Karabakh\u2019s 120,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia. Nagorno-Karabakh, known as Artsakh by Arm\u00adenians, is a landlocked mountainous area in the South Caucasus. The territory was claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 and has remained a point of tension ever since. In Soviet times, it remained part of the Azeri Soviet Republic but with autonomy. As the Soviet Union crumbled, what is known as the First Karabakh War erupted (1988-94) between Armenians and their Azeri neighbours. About 30,000 people were killed and more than a million people displaced. Azerbaijan lost a chunk of its territory with Arme\u00adnians left in control of most of Karabakh, alongside extra territory around Karabakh\u2019s perimeter. Azer\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00adb\u00adaijan vow\u00aded to take back control over the territory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Azerbaijani Pre\u00adsident Ilham Aliyev on Sunday raised the national flag in the capital of the former breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh \u2014 known as Khankendi by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10523,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}