The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that for three decades has engulfed Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the disputed territories of the unrecognized, hitherto Armenian-populated Artsakh Republic is nearing its end. On September 19–20, Azerbaijani forces overran Armenian areas and defeated fighters in the breakaway region. Many people in the Middle East might think of this remote mountainous area in the South Caucasus as irrelevant. But not only is Nagorno-Karabakh close to them geographically, key players involved in the conflict—Türkiye, Russia, Iran, and Israel—are central to what happens in the Middle East. However, Nagorno-Karabakh’s relevance goes even beyond that.
The endgame in Nagorno-Karabakh is strikingly similar to defining aspects of the conflict in Syria. It appears that Presidents Bashar al-Assad and Ilham Aliyev—two “modern” authoritarian leaders of around the same age who inherited power from their fathers and consistently rank at the bottom of the democracy index—have something in common. They have used similar methods for dealing with territories outside their control that host recalcitrant populations hostile to their rule. This begs the question: What can the conflict in Syria tell us about the last chapter in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict?
In 1988, the autonomous area of Nagorno-Karabakh tried to break away from Soviet Azerbaijan and join Soviet Armenia, a dispute that developed into an armed conflict. In the early 1990s, local Armenians, with help from the Republic of Armenia, seized Nagorno-Karabakh and large swathes of Azerbaijani territory, displacing many Azerbaijanis. In 2020, thanks to Turkish and Israeli support, Azerbaijan recaptured its lost lands, including parts of the Artsakh Republic. While nationalist rhetoric, often demonizing the other, has prevailed, both sides have committed crimes. Notably, Armenians perpetrated the Khojaly massacre against Azerbaijani civilians in 1992, and Azerbaijani soldiers used violence, including beheadings, against Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians after the 2020 war.
The war in 2020 ended with a ceasefire agreement in November brokered by Russia, which left Nagorno-Karabakh at the mercy of Russia’s 2,000-strong peacekeeping mission. Moscow was there to protect local Armenians and guarantee their access to Armenia proper through the so-called Lachin Corridor—the only link between Nagorno-Karabakh and the outside. In reality, however, Azerbaijan successfully encroached on Nagorno-Karabakh’s territory, before blockading it entirely starting in July 2023, amid Russian inaction, if not implicit collusion with Azerbaijan.
On the political level, the European Union, Russia, and the United States actively mediated between Yerevan and Baku, which over the past year resulted in two draft peace agreements, one sponsored by Russia, the other by the European Union and the United States. Armenia recognized Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, with Nagorno-Karabagh being located inside Azerbaijan. Meanwhile, relations between Armenia and Russia, two longtime allies, slowly deteriorated, while Moscow-Baku relations improved. This made Nagorno-Karabagh’s position ever more precarious, leading to the September 19–20 assault when Azerbaijan settled the territory’s fate by employing military force.
Azerbaijan’s approach to resolving the Nagorno-Karabagh problem has striking similarities to Assad’s approach in dealing with opposition enclaves across Syria between 2014 and 2018. In both cases, a crucial first step was cutting off the opposition areas from the outside world. In Homs, for instance, in 2014 the regime effectively severed the city’s supply routes to Lebanon and gradually tightened the siege against opposition-held quarters. Regime forces later used similar tactics against a number of opposition enclaves in Rural Damascus Governorate.
In Nagorno-Karabakh, starting in December 2022 Azerbaijan gradually took control of the Lachin Corridor, and in July 2023 Azerbaijani military forces fully blocked it, contrary to the November 2020 ceasefire agreement. At that point, with Russian doing nothing to counter such moves, Nagorno-Karabakh turned into an enclave at Azerbaijan’s mercy, very much the way Syria’s opposition enclaves became large prisons at the mercy of regime forces.
Although the humanitarian situation in Karabakh did not reach the levels seen in Madaya, for example, where people faced severe malnutrition, shortages of medicine and food, including baby formula, were reported eight months into the Nagorno-Karabakh blockade. Azerbaijan also cut gas and electricity supplies that came from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh via Azerbaijani territory. On August 21, in a Security Council meeting, almost all attendees urged Azerbaijan to reopen the Lachin Corridor. In both the Syrian and Azerbaijani cases, what has been visible is a policy that in Syria became known as “starvation until submission.” This has gone beyond imposing a blockade for military purposes and has entailed weaponizing aid, food, and other supplies to impose surrender.
In using aid as a pressure point, last April Azerbaijan put in place a checkpoint on the Lachin Corridor to monitor traffic, which was contrary to the 2020 ceasefire agreement. In July it completely blocked the road on the pretext that the International Committee of the Red Cross was smuggling unauthorized goods into Nagorno-Karabakh. With firm control over the Lachin Corridor, Baku suggested opening an alternative route—not through Armenia but through Azerbaijan—similar to Syria’s cross-line humanitarian access, which entailed delivering aid from Damascus across frontlines, and under almost full control of the Syrian regime.
Under international pressure, aid entered Nagorno-Karabakh on September 18 from two roads—the Lachin Corridor and the alternative road via the Azerbaijani city of Aghdam. After the September 19–20 attacks, more aid was sent into the devastated enclave. That was a relief for some, but, again, as the Syrian experience showed, alternative routes only create another tool for authoritarian regimes to torment a besieged population by closing and opening such passages at will, while using sovereignty arguments to withstand international pressure.
The discourse of the Syrian and Azerbaijani regimes has also been quite similar. Azerbaijan has portrayed itself as a constructive party that prefers dialogue. It has offered Armenians from Nagorno- Karabakh economic, political, and social reintegration into Azerbaijan, with educational, cultural, religious, and electoral rights—“because Azerbaijan is a free society,” as Aliyev has put it. The Azerbaijani side has also offered amnesty for those who lay down their weapons. The rhetoric is akin to the Syrian regime’s “Al-awda ila hedn al-watan” or “return to the embrace of the motherland” through the reintegration of Syrians who lived in opposition areas. This process entailed grave dangers when considering the Assad regime’s use of torture and arbitrary detention, or the absence of the rule of law or a fair judiciary.
Although it is unclear to what extend Baku will put these words into practice, the value of Azerbaijan’s offer diminishes when one considers that it has refused to give security guarantees to Armenians if they remain in Nagorno-Karabakh. Furthermore, the fact that there is no independent judiciary for all citizens; that Azerbaijan has an alarming record of “cultural genocide” against places of Armenian heritage in Azerbaijan, most notably the destruction of tens of thousands of UNESCO-protected ancient stone carvings; that it has engaged in gruesome human rights violations, such as extrajudicial killings, torture, and the beheading of Armenian civilians; and that it has severely repressed dissent at home; all these factors suggest that Aliyev’s reintegration plan may be no more than a cynical ploy.
In Syria’s case, blocking off, besieging, and demonizing opposition areas, before offering to return populations to the “embrace of the motherland,” were aimed at recapturing land minus a “problematic” population. Between 2016 and 2018, some 200,000 people were uprooted from their areas and bussed to opposition-held areas for refusing to test the regime’s benevolence.
The first groups of Armenians evicted from Nagorno-Karabakh are now arriving in Armenia proper. Whether the region ends up being fully or partly depopulated of Armenians remains to be seen. Either way, the replication of the Syrian scenario remains a real possibility: population eviction and Azerbaijan’s restoration of its writ over lands without a people, or lands with a subjugated people. This sad tale still echoes today in the empty streets of many Syrian villages, towns, and cities.
