Word: azerbaijanis
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First the buzzer started ringing, then the furious knocking began. Cowering in his apartment in Baku, Ashot Arutyunov, an Armenian retiree, knew better than to open his door. The previous night, Azerbaijani thugs armed with address lists had begun hunting down Armenians house by house. If only he and his family remained quiet, Arutyunov thought, the ominous pounding would stop...
...Azerbaijani capital of Baku, crowds blockaded the Communist Party headquarters and the republic's television studio, while impassioned speakers called for the secession of Azerbaijan and its reunification with regions of northern Iran in a single Islamic state. Demonstrators aligned with a group identified as the National Front Defense Committee used buses and trucks to barricade streets and keep troops from entering the city. Along the southern frontier with Iran, the scene of nationalist protests earlier this month, thousands of Azerbaijanis illegally crossed to the other side and staged rallies calling for a joint struggle to liberate Nagorno-Karabakh...
Through the week, as Azerbaijanis put up ferocious resistance, blockading roads and railways and sabotaging waterlines, the number of troops and police cadets swelled to 29,000. At first, government forces were told to exercise "maximum restraint." But when Azerbaijani militants turned on the soldiers, troops were instructed to fire in self-defense and to protect army weapons caches. Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov said the conflict was "almost civil...
...extremists are thus continuing their criminal activities," Baku's military commander, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Dubinyak, was quoted by the Azerbaijani radio as saying...
Yunusov said fighting continued near Salyanskiye Barracks in Baku, with 263 Azerbaijani military cadets and more than 130 classmates of other Soviet ethnic groups opposing Soviet troops who have cordoned off the area...