Page 37 - bnemagazine bne_December 2021_20211203.pdf

bne December 2021 Cover story I 37
the battlefield but in everyday life,” Babayan says.
These sorts of training programmes, while expanded in scope in recent months, have long been present in Syunik, where seemingly nearly every man is a veteran of one conflict or another.
Syunik is one of the strongholds of
the Yerkrapah veterans’ organisation, a political and paramilitary group
that played a large role in Armenian politics in the 1990s. The group has regularly organised its own trainings as well as directing local manpower to aid the army in Karabakh in times of war. They also occupy positions on the border, aiming to bolster the military’s capabilities of their own volition.
Fighters from Sisian have regularly borne the brunt of casualties when the conflict flares up, too.
In April 2016, a group of volunteers from the town headed to Karabakh on the second day of fighting in
what became known as the ‘Four Day War’. The day after arriving, they were arrayed in a rear area awaiting commands on where to deploy when they noticed a strange craft circling overhead. Minutes later, it picked up speed and descended towards them, slamming into their group in one of the first documented uses of a ‘suicide drone’ – in this case, an Israeli-made IAI Harop, an ominous precursor to the hundreds of casualties such drones would cause in autumn 2020.
Devastating drones
Those 2016 losses would be repeated on a greater scale in last year’s war.
Hasmik Azoyan, a local hotel owner, tells that Sisian suffered the most dead of anywhere outside of the capital Yerevan in autumn 2020.
“We lost at least 80 dead, maybe even 90, as there are still some missing,” Azoyan says. For a city of barely 12,000, that was more than enough to ensure everyone knew at least one of those killed.
Azoyan’s own husband is a veteran, as with so many other Sisian men.
“Already on the 14th, we were expecting something to happen
were fighting with swords against Bayraktars,” she says.
Meanwhile, the exposed geographic position of Sisian – situated just 15 km
“They won’t stop with Karabakh. If they beat us, they’ll come for Syunik”
following the tensions in Artsakh [the Armenian name for Karabakh],” Azoyan says. “My husband told me to get his uniform ready, but the army managed to contain [the Azerbaijani attack] on its own,” she says.
The terrors of 21st-century warfare, with its devastating drones, is a lesson Sisian’s residents have learned early – and one they continue to take heed of.
“We are always ready in spirit, but it’s not enough,” says Azoyan. “You need training – even participating in the last wars is not enough. The changes in military technology happen so fast, as we saw last year. It’s like we
from two different Azerbaijani borders – looms large in people’s thoughts.
“We are like a bone in the throat of Turkey and Azerbaijan and their pan-Turkic plans,” Azoyan says. “They make it clear enough by their maps that they want this land.” And for locals, the fate of the parts of Karabakh seized by Azerbaijan last year provides cold comfort.
“We hosted about 100 refugees from Artsakh last year,” says Azoyan. “There was one man among them last year who kept saying, ‘they won’t stop with [Karabakh]. If they beat us, they’ll come for Syunik’. Maybe he was onto something.”
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