Why Azerbaijan and Armenia Fight With Such Tenacity

Fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh has broken out repeatedly since Armenians seized control of the territory and surrounding areas from Azerbaijan in a war that started soon after the 1991 collapse of the former Soviet Union. That conflict killed more than 30,000 people and displaced another 1 million. Despite decades of mediation by the U.S., Russia and France, a solution remained elusive. The latest bout of fighting, a 44-day battle that started Sept. 27, was the worst in decades, much broader and more geopolitically fraught than the previous skirmishes that had broken out since the end of the war in 1994. This time, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave unreserved backing to his country’s ally Azerbaijan, raising the stakes significantly and tipping the military balance. Russian President Vladimir Putin brokered a peace deal after Armenians, facing defeat at the hands of the Azerbaijani army, agreed to stop fighting and withdraw their forces.

Today’s Armenia and Azerbaijan were for centuries situated in fluid borderlands between the Russian, Ottoman and Persian empires, with both suffering partition and brutality at the hands of much larger powers. The two communities began to fight each other as those empires collapsed toward the end of World War I and they sought to form independent states, with Russia backing Armenia and Ottoman Turkey supporting Azerbaijan in what amounted to a proxy war. Nagorno-Karabakh was a center of tension from the start, because the mountainous region hosted a mixed community of Armenians and Azeris and was seen by both nations as central to their national histories and identities.