Azerbaijan: Cease fire declared in Nagorno-Karabakh
An Armenian artillery position of the self-defense army of Nagorno-Karabakh on April 3, 2016. Photo by Vahram Baghdasaryan/EPA
Azerbaijan and the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh said on Tuesday they were halting hostilities after four days of intense fighting between them that had sparked fears the conflict could spiral into all-out war.
Reuters was not immediately able to verify whether the fighting - a resurgence of a decades-old conflict over the status of the region - had, in fact, stopped.
Dozens have been killed on both sides during the recent flare-up of the long-festering ethnic tensions between the mainly Muslim Azeris and their Christian Armenian neighbors. The war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s killed around 30,000 and displaced hundreds of thousands.
The ceasefire announcement came as several European countries urged an end to the fighting, worried that an escalation could cause instability in a region on the borders of eastern Europe and western Asia that serves as a corridor for pipelines taking oil and gas to world markets.