(Caucasus) After years of building up her armed forces Islamic Azerbajan struck her renegade Christian province of Nagorno-Karabakh, which ceded from Empire when the Soviet Union broke up and sided with Christian Armenia. yesterday, with both sides claiming success by the killing (doubtful) of hundreds of the otherside soldiers and with bothsides playing the victim :
Azerbaijan with a report of a school getting shelled. However all that withstanding more credible casualties figures have now been reported as 18 ethnic-Armenian troops having died, while
Azerbaijan said it had lost 12 troops.
As the terrain is somewhat mountainous, the advantage does lie with Armenia which is defending , but Azerbaijan does have the most bigger and much more modern military. So what has caused this latest shin dig? Well below is a most informative video from Al-Jazeera which looks in most dark corners of the geo-political map, but one thing nobody has mentioned is the fact that after years of heavy military spending , Baku cut the military budget in January by 40% i suppose now that budget won't be getting cut now will it?
So why is the enclave so contentious? The region Nagorno-Karabakh belonged to Armenia when the Bolsheviks annexed the region in 1921 Stalin (The commissar in charge) placed Nakhchivan ASSR and Karabakh under Azerbaijani control to try to placate Turkey to join the Soviet Union. (Nakhchivan is the Azerbaijan region on the otherside of Armenia on the map above). When the Soviet Union broke up around 1991, the locals decided that they didn't want to live under the jackboot of Islamic Azerbaijan , but rather with their rightful family in Armenia, as Baku wouldn't have any of that, one of the bloodiest wars of the time (funny how the world only had eyes for Bosnia and Iraq at the time) kicked off (20-30,000 dead) Armenia ended up wining and the 7% of Azerbaijan territory (Which they had occupied for 70 years ) went back to Armenia.
