Reclaiming Azerbaijani Territories: Inside the Recaptured Districts from Armenia
Azerbaijan’s Fuzuli International airport, which was inaugurated with much fanfare by Presidents Ilham Aliyev and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in October 2021, has been largely empty since its opening. The $44 million airport has reported only around one plane arriving per week, and flight tracking websites show zero arrivals or departures thus far in 2024.
The airport is just one part of a larger construction drive in territory recaptured from ethnic Armenians following the Second Karabakh War launched by Baku in 2020. Another sleek international airport was opened near Zangilan in October 2022, and a third airport is under construction near Lachin in the mountains.
The Azerbaijani government has framed these developments as a “great return to Azerbaijan’s liberated territories” for hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis who fled advancing Armenian forces in the 1988-94 war over Nagorno-Karabakh. The vast scale of the projects may also be due in part to various branches of the Azerbaijani state drumming up ideas to win easy funding, according to Azerbaijani economist Toghrul Valiyev.
In September 2023, almost the entire ethnic Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh fled to Armenia after Baku launched a military offensive that brought the breakaway region under Azerbaijani control. However, some observers believe that the massive construction projects may be a cover for the ongoing erasure of thousands of Armenian historical sites in and around Nagorno-Karabakh.
Armenian-American researcher Simon Maghakyan, who has extensively researched open-source imagery of the recaptured regions, says that access to Nagorno-Karabakh appears to be tightly controlled, even for Azerbaijani tourists or former residents.
In December 2021, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made a provisional ruling that Azerbaijan needed to “punish and prevent” the destruction of Armenian monuments. Before the ICJ’s ruling, one of Nagorno-Karabakh’s most iconic buildings, the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral, had its spire shorn down to a byzantine-like dome after its capture by Azerbaijani forces.
Despite these challenges, there is some hope that the prominent Armenian cultural heritage that remains could survive if satellite monitoring and international pressure can continue. As of October 2023, only around 2,000 Azerbaijanis had returned to the empty regions, and Baku aims to resettle some 150,000 people by 2027.
