‘They killed us, how can we live with them in peace?’

Yerevan, Armenia – Alisa Ghazaryan was full of excitement and nerves as she began her first year at university in Stepanakert, having moved from her home in the town of Nagorno-Karabakh.

But just as the mandate began, Azerbaijani forces began shelling the city, which Baku knows as Khankendi, the September 19th.

While they carried out what they described as an “anti-terrorist operation,” the 18-year-old took refuge in the basement of the university.

“I was born there, I grew up there,” he said of his home. “When I was there I felt completely free.”

Until recently, Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-troubled mountainous enclave, was home to some 120,000 ethnic Armenians who dominated the region. Since the Baku lightning offensive, more than 100,000 people, including Alisa, have fled to Armenia.

Despite assurances from Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to protect their civil rights, many say they feared persecution after years of mutual distrust and open hatred between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Several displaced people Al Jazeera spoke to in Armenia said they expected a massacre.

According to ethnic Armenian officials, at least 200 people were killed in the Baku attack, including 10 civilians, and more than 400 were injured.

Baku downplayed claims of civilian casualties but acknowledged that “collateral damage” was possible.

Azerbaijan, which announced that 192 of its soldiers were killed in the operation, said its bombing was aimed at disarming ethnic Armenian separatists in the region, parts of which now resemble a ghost town.

Al Jazeera was unable to verify the number of victims on either side.

The attack came after a 10-month blockade, effectively imposed by Azerbaijan after closing the Lachin corridor to Armenia, preventing the flow of food, fuel and medicine. Baku had accused Armenia of funneling weapons to separatists through the winding mountain road, a claim denied by both sides.

The unrecognized local government surrendered after 24 hours of fighting. Aliyev said his “iron fist” restored Azerbaijan’s sovereignty. Late last month, ethnic Armenian officials in Nagorno-Karabakh saying the region will cease to exist as a self-proclaimed breakaway republic on January 1 next year.

‘We are only here to not be on the streets’

Alisa and her family fled through the Lachin corridor, which has since been reopened.

They stay at a friend’s house on the outskirts of the Armenian capital, Yerevan. Fourteen people currently live in this small space, sharing two rooms.

At night they sleep side by side on the living room floor.

“We’re just here to not be on the streets,” Alisa said.

It is a long way from their home in Karabakh, which they had just finished renovating.

The journey to Armenia, which usually lasts several hours, took days for some as people left the region.

The European Parliament said this week that “the current situation amounts to ethnic cleansing.”

Those who left are scattered across Armenia, facing an uncertain future and mourning the loss of their homeland.

Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as a territory of Azerbaijan, including Armenia. The former Soviet rivals have fought two wars over the enclave, in the 1990s and in 2020. In the first conflict, ethnic Armenians seized swaths of land, displacing Azerbaijanis, while Baku triumphed in the war. 2020. Russian peacekeepers have since operated in the region, but Armenians blame them for allowing Azerbaijan’s latest attack, which was widely condemned in the West.

Now only a few hundred remain in Karabakh, mostly elderly or disabled people.

“Nature was so beautiful. There are mountains and forests. Our house was right on the edge of a forest, we used to walk there a lot,” said Alisa, as she looked at a photo of herself on her phone of a green hillside.

Ina, her mother, wanted to throw away the key to her house, but Alisa begged her not to.

“Maybe one day we’ll come back, maybe when I’m an old woman,” Alisa said hopefully.

“Aliyev describes us and our heroes as terrorists, but in reality he is the terrorist. “I want the world to know that Artsakh is our homeland and not (Azerbaijan’s),” he added, using the self-proclaimed name for the region.

Many of the displaced had already fled in previous wars.

Angela Sazkisjan-Yan, a glamorous 65-year-old woman, left Baku in 1995.

“No one would stay (in Karabakh) because everyone clearly knows the Azerbaijani handwriting,” he said.

Some people destroyed their furniture or dishes before leaving, but Angela cleaned her apartment in Stepanakert and even left the refrigerator on and full of food, perhaps a symbolic gesture of her hope to return one day.

“Everyone abandoned their properties, but that is a small part; The worst thing is that we leave our homeland, our roots. Even my grandparents are buried there,” he told Al Jazeera in Abovyan, northeast of Yerevan.

He stays with his sister’s family, whom he hasn’t seen in two years.

“I am very happy to be reunited with them because we are an inseparable part of each other, but I have great pain in my soul for everything that has happened,” he said.

Many Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh say they were separated from their families during the blockade.

Lilit Shahverdyan, a 20-year-old freelance journalist, was in Yerevan with her sister during the tensions, while the rest of her family was at their home in Stepanakert.

“We just hugged each other and started crying,” she said, describing the moment she finally saw her family, in the border town of Goris, after almost a year apart.

He said the lockdown made his family closer and stronger than ever.

“All we have now is just our family and a single apartment in Yerevan. Everything else, not only the property, but all our memories, life goals and the future, were in our homeland, now everything has disappeared.”

When her mother locked the door of her house for the last time in Stepanakert, tears streamed down her face.

“It was the most beautiful house. My father built it 10 years ago. I really enjoyed waking up there every day just going to the garden, cuddling my cats, or talking to my neighbors. “In my childhood everything was related to that house.”

Lilit hoped to return to Stepanakert to work after finishing her university studies in Yerevan. She now wants to leave Armenia completely.

“I’m just scared that some shit will happen again. And I don’t want my children to suffer as much as I do. Armenia is not a safe place as long as we have a neighboring dictator and this government. I don’t want to have another traumatized generation,” she said.

Hopes for a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan appear to be fading after Azerbaijan canceled at the last minute a crucial meeting scheduled for this week between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev.

“Not only is it unrealistic, but it is also a crime to believe that now is the time to collaborate in a peaceful relationship,” said Angela, who said she knew 10 people who died in the recent fighting.

“They killed us, how can we live in peace with them?”

Ara Papian, a lawyer and former Armenian diplomat, believes that further aggression by Azerbaijan is possible in the future, particularly in the Syunik region, where Azerbaijan wants to build a corridor through Armenian territory to connect with its exclave, Nakhchivan.

Even if a peace treaty is signed, Azerbaijan “will find an excuse and attack,” he predicted.

Papian accused the West of refusing to condemn and sanction Azerbaijan because some nations do not want to get on the wrong side of Turkey, a NATO member and Azerbaijan’s closest ally.

The European Union’s gas deal with Azerbaijan exposes the bloc’s hypocrisy, he added.

“The EU and the West do not buy oil and gas from the dictator (Russian President Vladimir) Putin so as not to fuel the war in Ukraine, but they buy the same from Azerbaijan knowing that the money will not go to the prosperity of the people of Azerbaijan, but to Azerbaijan. “They will become new weapons, which means a new war, which has happened.”

Housing is now the top priority for displaced people, said Margarit Piliposyan, deputy national director of the NGO Armenia Relief Fund (FAR), which has been distributing food and humanitarian supplies in Vayk, a city south of Yerevan.

The Armenian government recently announced financial support for displaced people with 100,000 dram per person ($239) and then 40,000 dram per month ($96) for six months for housing expenses.

However, several people told Al Jazeera that they had not yet received any help from the government, including Lira Arzangulyan, 33, and Alina Khachatryan, 31, two sisters, who fled after the latest escalation.

They moved with their four children and mother-in-laws to the village of Mrgavan in Artashat, a province in the shadow of Mount Ararat, where more than 100 displaced families now live.

They were previously displaced from their home in Martuni after the 2020 war.

The house is small, with peeling wallpaper and a gas stove. It’s cold inside, even on a mild September day. The owner allows them to stay there for free, for now.

“We have nowhere else to go, so we will stay here. Houses for rent are too expensive, we can’t afford it. “We are still insecure and in shock,” Alina said.

Children play in the other room while their mothers cry softly. Lira’s mascara runs down her cheek as she says how much she misses visiting her mother’s grave in Karabakh.

Both lament Russian peacekeepers, whom Lira described as “indifferent and doing nothing” to protect or help them.

The first United Nations monitoring mission visited Karabakh on Sunday.

“Why didn’t they come when we had nothing to eat? Now it is empty, there is no one living there. “If they had come before this escalation started and given us hope and assurance that there is someone to support us, then we would have stayed there,” Lira said.

Their children run in and hug them.

“I hope that the next generation will change and maybe when our children grow up they can return there, maybe as tourists, to see where they are from,” Alina added.