When more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh last September, Nina Shahverdyan and her brother, parents and cousin spent 30 hours on the road trying to leave.

“People died of heart attacks. People died because they were just too old to live through that pain. Children were crying,” she remembers.

In a matter of days Azerbaijan’s military regained all the lands it had lost in a war triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

What worries Armenians now is that their neighbour wants more, even if Azerbaijan’s president talks of being close “as never before” to a peace deal.

They have heard Ilham Aliyev speak before of Armenia being “Western Azerbaijan” and see it as a sign of imminent invasion.

Only last month Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan warned that Azerbaijan was looking to start “a new, large-scale war”. He has since agreed to hand back four abandoned border villages in a sign of improving relations.

Azerbaijan says Armenian fears are unfounded. However, President Aliyev has demanded that Armenia give his country a free railroad corridor through its territory to its exclave of Nakhichevan.

Armenia wants to have control over the road and the Azerbaijani leader has in the past threatened to take the corridor “by force”.

Read Original Article