Dozens of people are feared dead and hundreds more injured after a powerful explosion at a fuel storage depot in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, as thousands of ethnic Armeniansafter the Azerbaijani military reclaimed full control of it in a lightning offensive last week.
“At this moment we do not have any medical resources left,” a hospital official told Siranush Sargsyan, a Stepanakert-based freelance journalist, adding that they were out of anti-burn antibiotics. “We have a very high number of burn patients … We need to urgently evacuate our patients to specialised burn units in Yerevan.”
At an aid station near the border, a woman holding a one-year-old child named Avi told the Guardian that his grandfather had been killed and his father severely injured in the fuel depot blast. They had all been planning to flee to Armenia together, said the woman, who said she was a relative and handed the child to his mother.Local volunteers played with Avi, throwing him in the air and tickling his nose, as family members tried to calm his mother.
Armenian officials and many refugees have accused Azerbaijan of launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing, using the 10-month blockade and war to push the ethnic Armenian population out of the territories using force and coercion. Dump trucks rolled through the border checkpoint with men, women and children sitting high above the ground on tarpaulins laid out across the dump box. Soviet-era Ladas, minibuses, tractors and even some luxury SUVs were laden with personal possessions, some wrapped in carpets or snakeskin bags tied to roof racks.