GORIS, Armenia : After the village was bombed so hard there was no way to bury the truckloads of dead, he fled with his family and stuffed whatever possessions could be salvaged into two vans.
Petya Grigoryan is one of the first ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to make it to Armenia after a lightning 24-hour Azerbaijani military operation defeated the Karabakh Armenian forces.
The ethnic Armenians of Karabakh, internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, say they will not live as part of Azerbaijan and that almost all of the 120,000 Armenians there will leave for Armenia.
So far several hundred have reached Armenia.
Grigoryan, a 69-year-old driver, said his Kochoghot village in what the Armenians know as the Martakert district of Karabakh was pummelled by Azerbaijan armed forces. There were two KAMAZ-truckloads full of civilian dead in the village, he said.
“There was nowhere to bury them,” Grigoryan told Reuters after making his way down the Lachin corridor and across the border into Armenia, where Reuters interviewed him and other refugees in the border town of Goris.
“We took what we could and left. We don’t know where we’re going. We have nowhere to go,” he said.
Of the 500 villagers, he said 40 had got out.
Reuters was unable to independently verify his account but it chimed with the outline given by other ethnic Armenians fleeing Karabakh, which Azerbaijan says will be turned into a “paradise” and fully integrated.
Azerbaijan said it launched the operation against Karabakh forces after attacks on its own citizens. President Ilham Aliyev said his army had only targeted Karabakh fighters and that civilians had been protected.
