Azerbaijani soldiers destroy Armenian cross stone in Artsakh

Panarmenian – Another video featuring Azerbaijani troops toppling another Armenian monument has surfaced online, according to publications on social media pages.

Footage shared by Armenian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anna Naghdalyan depicts Azeri soldiers knocking down a khachkar in the village of Arakel in Nagorno-Karabakh’s Hadrut province which has come under Azerbaijan’s control after the recent war.

During the hostilities, Azerbaijani forces launched two targeted attacks on the Holy Savior Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi. After taking control of the city, they destroyed the domes of Saint John the Baptist Church. Azerbaijan earlier “restored” a church by replacing its Armenian inscription with glass art.

Concerns about the preservation of cultural sites in Nagorno-Karabakh are made all the more urgent by the Azerbaijani government’s history of systemically destroying indigenous Armenian heritage—acts of both warfare and historical revisionism. The Azerbaijani government has secretly destroyed a striking number of cultural and religious artifacts in the late 20th century. Within Nakhichevan alone, a historically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani forces destroyed at least 89 medieval churches, 5,840 khachkars (Armenian cross stones) and 22,000 historical tombstones between 1997 and 2006.