Armenia says over two thousand soldiers dead in clashes against Azerbaijan

Armenia said on Saturday that over two thousand fighters were killed in six weeks of clashes with Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, reported AFP.

Armenian health ministry spokeswoman Alina Nikoghosyan wrote on Facebook, “To date, our forensic service has examined the corpses of 2,317 dead servicemen, including unidentified ones.”

Compared to the last confirmed toll among Armenian fighters, the latest death toll pushes its fatalities up by nearly 1,000. 

Almost two months of fierce clashes between the two countries ended this week with a Russian-brokered peace accord that sees Armenia cede swathes of territory captured by Azerbaijan’s forces. 

Although Baku’s army has never revealed details of its military fatalities, the overall human cost of the fighting is expected to be much higher than reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said that the number of fatalities in the conflict was higher than 4,000 and that some 8,000 people had been left injured.

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According to Putin, tens of thousands of people had been displaced by the heavy clashes that also left “civilian infrastructure and numerous cultural sites” destroyed.

The peace deal stipulates that Azerbaijan’s forces will retain control over areas seized in the fighting, which includes the second-largest town of Shusha, while Armenia agreed to a timetable to withdraw from large parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions.