Crisis Group’s Analyst for South Caucasus Zaur Shiriyev had the rare opportunity to see up close the realities of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. 

With a long-awaited permit from the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defence, he toured the Azerbaijani side of the Line of Contact around Nagorno-Karabakh, control of which Azerbaijan lost in a brutal war with Armenian forces in the early 1990s. He visited Azerbaijani army units as well as military installations along the international Armenia-Azerbaijan border.

Talking to Azerbaijani soldiers and villagers living near the front, Zaur found that even though a new communication channel has sparked hope for negotiations between Azerbaijan and Armenia, decades of conflict mean that the path to peace will be rocky.