Ganja is Azerbaijan’s second largest city, located in the country’s west, and well outside of Nagorno-Karabakh. Despite this, the city has found itself in the line of fire of Armenian artillery several times during the recent flareup of violence there.
Missile attacks hit Ganja over the weekend, killing at least 13 civilians, two of them children. The missiles hit a residential area. Azeri officials said over 20 houses were destroyed in the strikes.
Armenia has denied the missile fire, but there is no alternative version of events that would result in that neighborhood getting destroyed. One of the hospitalized civilians, three-year-old Khadija Shahnazarli, has lost her entire family to the missile strikes, with her mother and father and 16 month-old sister, all slain.
Deaths of civilians inside Azerbaijan is inflaming tensions, particularly since they are nowhere near the combat area in Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at odds over this for decades, and it seems many civilian bystanders are getting dragged into the conflict.
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