Eleven Karabakh residents move to Armenia, possibly none remain in region

Eleven residents of Nagorno-Karabakh who remained in the region after Azerbaijan’s September 2023 offensive have moved to Armenia, the country’s Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Arsen Torosyan announced on Friday.

“Ten Armenians and one Armenian citizen of Russian ethnicity have requested permission from the Azerbaijani and Armenian authorities to move to Armenia and are now in Armenia,” Torosyan said. 

The minister did not specify when this happened and did not say whether a single Armenian remained in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Following Azerbaijan’s September 2023 offensive that came after an eight-month blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, all but a few Karabakh Armenians fled to Armenia. In the following years, the number of Armenians who stayed behind was estimated at between 12 and 20 people, almost all of them elderly. In 2024, Gegham Stepanyan, Karabakh’s former Ombudsman, said that the exact number of Armenians who remained in the region was 14.

Since then, at least one of the remaining residents has died, no fewer than two have moved to Armenia, and one Stepanakert resident, Karen Avanesyan, was sentenced by an Azerbaijani court to 16 years in prison on charges of plotting a terrorist attack.

Media reports said that those who opted to stay were all held in a single building in Stepanakert, the region’s capital. Earlier this week, Azerbaijani media reported that the first Azerbaijanis, a total of 36 families, had moved into the city. 

Earlier this month, Azerbaijan released four Karabakh civilians who had been serving prison sentences and handed them over to Armenia. On the same day, Armenia transferred two Syrian mercenaries taken captive during the 2020 Karabakh war to Turkey, from where they were to be sent to Syria to continue serving life sentences.