Posted on 09/17/2012 5:12:22 AM PDT by P.O.E.
LINE OF CONTACT, Azerbaijan (Reuters) - A dusty trench, interrupted every few metres by lookout posts and gun positions, winds its way as far as the eye can see.
"Put your head above the trench and they'll shoot you," says a young ethnic Armenian soldier, peering through a narrow slit in a concrete watchtower at Azeri lines 400 metres away where he says snipers lie in wait.
The bullets fly both ways. On the other side of the minefields, Khosrov Shukurov's daughter was recently shot in the arm. The 70-year-old Azeri farmer keeps his cows on leashes to stop them straying beyond the wall built to protect his village.
Sporadic fire fights have intensified along the front line around Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave within Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus controlled by ethnic Armenians since a war in the early 1990s that killed about 30,000 people.
Azerbaijan has stepped up threats to take the region back and its decision to give a hero's welcome to a soldier convicted of hacking an Armenian to death on a NATO course has highlighted the risk of a war that could draw in Turkey, Russia and Iran.
When the ethnic Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence as the Soviet Union collapsed, and took over more Azeri territory outside the region than within it, Christian Armenia avoided direct war with Muslim Azerbaijan.
It now says it would not stand aside if the enclave it helped establish was attacked.
Both it and Azerbaijan have more powerful weapons than two decades ago and if pipelines taking Azeri oil and gas to Europe via Turkey or Armenia's nuclear power station were threatened, war could spread.
Armenia has a collective security agreement with its regional ally Russia, while Azerbaijan has one with Turkey, itself a member of NATO for which an attack on one member state is an attack on all 28.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned of a "much broader conflict" when she visited Armenia in June and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Friday he was "deeply concerned" by the Azeri soldier's pardon last month.
Add this to the China/Japan hackle-risings, the widespread Muslim hegemony spike, and what-all.
I'm beginning to worry, wondering who or what is going to the be the Archduke Franz Ferdinand / Gavrilo Princip this time around.
The last time around, the out of the closet homosexuals were in Kaiser Wilhems's court and the Kaiser's response to the Archduke's assassination was to my understanding largely a wag the dog attempt to distract the German public from the latest homosexual scandal in his palace.
This is quite a dangerous time.
Thanks for posting this. ‘Pod.
wow. thanks for posting this!
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...and as a member of NATO, the US could once again,
fight against 2 Christian nations,
to defend 2 Muslim nations.
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(just as we bombed Qadafi, who had been helping us against radical Islam, until Obama decided to replace him with Al-Queda!)
I’m surprised North Korea doesn’t pop its heads out of the trench to attack and kill a bunch of South Koreans to get food and nuclear concessions from the US and its partners in appeasement.
What a lot of people don't realize is that this conflict is not religious in nature at all. The roots are in the Armenian Genocide of 1915, which was purely political.
I am going to be very, very disappointed if the USA gets on the wrong side of this. My wife is Armenian and was born in Khanlar, Azerbaijan (now Goygol), a little bit north of what is now the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. Her whole family (and most of the Armenians in the city) were run out by the government/army in 1987 with less than a weeks notice. They essentially left everything they had and moved to Russia.
The Azeris and Turks can be nasty, and this is one subject the USSR/Russia was/is on what I consider to be the right side of the conflict.
Yep, they need to get in line
“Armenia has a collective security agreement with its regional ally Russia, while Azerbaijan has one with Turkey, itself a member of NATO for which an attack on one member state is an attack on all 28.”
NATO has become what it was intended to prevent.
It would be a nightmare for Russia as Azerbaijan and Armenia are both friendly countries.It is kind of remarkable though how history repeats itself,I don’t see this turning into a war but if it did....it might well spread to other key players.
“I’m beginning to worry, wondering who or what is going to the be the Archduke Franz Ferdinand / Gavrilo Princip this time around.”
“...some damn fool thing in the Balkans,” as Winston Churchill so eloquently put it. He was predicting the cause of the next war.
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