The office of a presidential adviser in Azerbaijan said Friday that the country would allow a group of experts from the United Nations to visit the Karabakh region "in a matter of days." Media will also have a chance to visit Karabakh, it said.
The United States and others have called on Baku to allow international monitors into Karabakh. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has said earlier that the rights of Karabakh's Armenians would be fully respected but that his "iron fist" had consigned the idea of an independent ethnic Armenian Karabakh to history. Aliyev told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a phone call on Tuesday that his forces had targeted only "military facilities ... during the anti-terror measures, which lasted less than 24 hours, and civilians were not harmed," according to a statement from the Azerbaijani president's office.
Earlier this month, Azerbaijan carried out a lightning offensive to reclaim full control over Karabakh and demanded that Armenian separatists in the region lay down their weapons and the separatist "government" dismantle itself. Separatists announced their "republic" would cease to exist in January 2024.
On Friday, Russia's Tass news agency announced that Azerbaijan's military has detained a former commander of separatists at a border checkpoint with Armenia. According to Tass, the commander, Levon Mnatsakanyan, led the army of the so-called Republic of Artsakh from 2015 to 2018.
