Hadrut - Territory Lost by Armenian Invaders

Baku / 13.10.20 / Turan: During the battles with the Armenian army, starting from September 27, 2020, the most contradictory information has been received about hostilities in the Karabakh town of Hadrut.

This settlement with the Persian name "ga" - "du" - "rud", meaning "between two rivers", is flanked by two rivers with Turkic names - Gyunei-chai and Guzei-chai (North and South rivers).

Before the conflict began in 1988, Azerbaijanis and Armenians lived here. The Azerbaijanis were expelled, and the Armenian population here doubled to 4,000. Now the Armenians are also fleeing from here.

The President of Azerbaijan announced the capture of Hadrut on October 10, but the Armenians continue to insist on complete control over Hadrut and accuse Baku of misinformation.

After the liberation of the city of Jabrail (adjacent to Hadrut), the Ministry of Defense provided video evidence of its release, but in the case of Hadrut this has not yet been done.

On October 10, the Armenian side reported that the leader of the separatists Araik Harutyunyan met with the local population in Hadrut, and that an Azeri unit of 200 people entered Hadrut.

The Russian blogger Semyon Pegov, paid by the Armenians, claims about the Turkish special forces, whom, allegedly, the Armenian forces are successfully neutralizing.

During the fighting, more than half of the houses were damaged, the Caucasian Knot reported with reference to a resident of the town, Gagik Avanesyan. According to him, women and children were evacuated from the town, and part of the local population remained together with soldiers of the Armenian Armed Forces and volunteers.

On October 12, in an interview with the Turkish TV channel Haber Global, the President of Azerbaijan made it clear: the Azerbaijani army "did not enter these settlements, because from a military point of view, this is not necessary," adding that the army took all the heights over the village.

This can be regarded as a desire to save the lives of soldiers and the absence of plans to seize settlements.

The tactics of occupying heights, and not settlements, can be traced through the actions of the Azerbaijani army along the entire line of fire. The villages of Talysh, Sugovushan, Chaily and others were liberated on October 3, and the Defense Ministry posted video footage from the streets of these villages on October 11-12. Military experts explain the time difference by the fact that after the liberation of a settlement, it takes time to completely clean it up and neutralize it from enemy mines.

The most difficult battles for the entire period of the war since September 27 took place in the area of Hadrut and the heights around it, from where most of the Jabrail and Fizuli regions are shot through.

Jabrail (the biblical name of the Archangel Gabriel) is an Azerbaijani town completely destroyed to the ground, like all other towns occupied by the Armenians in the 90s. The Jabrail region was not part of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region (NK) of Azerbaijan, although it was included by the separatists in the so called NKR.

As for Hadrut, its loss for Armenians has a moral and psychological significance.

In purely military terms, this means the collapse and loss of control in the southern sector of the front.

Complete defeat in Hadrut is not only a moral shock, but a sign of impending defeat in the war with Azerbaijan.

The daily increase in the number of refugees from Karabakh will exacerbate the already difficult situation of public sentiment in Armenia and its economy.

For the Azerbaijani Armed Forces, control over Hadrut opens the way for the liberation of Fizuli and a further offensive in several directions. The next targets can be Khojavend (Martuni), Agdam and Shusha.

The Azerbaijani army can create an encirclement cauldron, into which large groups of the Armenian army will fall.    —0—