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- 01 30, 2025
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MORE THAN 200 people, mostly soldiers, have been killed in the past ten days. Shells are falling on towns in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkish-made drones are loitering in the sky before blasting targets on the ground—and filming the destruction, to be posted on YouTube (see ). This is not just a small war in a far-off place. It already involves bigger powers, and it could get much bloodier and nastier.Nagorno-Karabakh is a disputed enclave populated largely by (Christian) Armenians. It broke away from (Muslim) Azerbaijan as the Soviet Union collapsed. Armenia supported it, and seized a huge chunk of Azerbaijani territory to connect with it, during a war that killed tens of thousands of people and displaced perhaps 1m more. A ceasefire was reached in 1994, but there have been repeated flare-ups since then—and this one is easily the worst. The Azerbaijanis are again trying to take their land back by force. Russia has a collective-security agreement with Armenia. Turkey backs Azerbaijan, whose people are ethnically and culturally close to Turks. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sees the conflict as a chance to assert himself as a regional hegemon and Muslim champion, as he is already doing in Syria and Libya. Russia has so far acquiesced, but that may not last. Iran borders both countries and has a large Azeri minority; it could easily be sucked in. Pipelines carrying gas from the Caspian Sea run near the front lines.