Foreign Ministry: Any activity in occupied Azerbaijani territories illegal

By Azernews

By Rashid Shirinov

Any activity conducted in the occupied Azerbaijani territories is illegal, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan Khalaf Khalafov told reporters in Baku on December 27.

He was commenting on the reports about the restoration of a mosque by Iranian specialists in Azerbaijani territories occupied by the Armenian armed forces.

“Armenia by all means tries to carry out illegal activities in the occupied Azerbaijani territories and to settle there Armenians from abroad. These actions contradict the international law,” said Khalafov.

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson Hikmat Hajiyev recently noted that one of the fundamental principles of Azerbaijani-Iranian relations is non-interference of the states in the internal affairs of each other.

He said that Armenia is a country that looted, destroyed and abused the material and cultural monuments of the Azerbaijani people in the occupied territories, including mosques belonging to the Islamic religion.

Since the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and occupation of Azerbaijani territories, Armenian aggressors destroyed 1,200 historical and architectural monuments, looted 27 museums, over 100,000 items were exported to Armenia. In addition, the Armenian occupiers destroyed 152 religious monuments and 62 mosques, 4.6 million books in 927 libraries, including the Holy Quran and rare Islamic manuscripts.

Armenia broke out a lengthy war against Azerbaijan laying territorial claims on its South Caucasus neighbor. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.