Turkey Stirs the Caucasus Pot as Casualties Mount

Despite global efforts, it appears no immediate end is in sight for the escalating Caucasus conflict, now entering its second week. On Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rejected calls for a cease-fire made by the United States, Russia and France, as his foreign minister dismissed the efforts as “superficial” and “not useful.” Turkey backs Azerbaijan in its fight against Armenia over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and several countries have blamed it for secretly supplying weapons and military personnel to its ally in an attempt to tighten its grasp on yet another corner of the Middle East. As details and specifics have proven hard to come by in recent days, both Azerbaijan and Armenia claim to have killed hundreds of opposing soldiers, while blaming their enemy for purposefully targeting and killing civilians. The two countries are quarreling over the long-disputed region, which holds an ethnic Armenian majority and which in 1992 seceded from Azerbaijan. After a bloody war that claimed the lives of close to 30,000, a fragile cease-fire was reached in 1994, which has since been sporadically broken.