Armenia seeks Trump’s help as conflict rages with Azerbaijan

When Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, spoke by telephone Thursday with President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, he raised a delicate issue: Why is nothing being done to stop a longtime US ally, Turkey, from using US-made F-16 jets against ethnic Armenians in a disputed mountain region?

Pashinyan’s call to the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, followed an eruption of heavy fighting in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, a remote territory at the center of the most enduring and venomous of the “frozen conflicts” left by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.

The breakaway enclave, legally part of Azerbaijan but controlled by Armenians for the past three decades, has seen many military flare-ups over the years. But the current fighting, Pashinyan said in a telephone interview, has taken on a far more dangerous dimension because of Turkey’s direct military intervention in support of Azerbaijan, its ethnic Turkic ally.

Also Read: Cities under fire as Armenia-Azerbaijan fighting intensifies

On Sunday, news reports said, the forces of Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, exchanged rocket fire, with missiles falling on Azerbaijan’s second largest city, Ganja, and on the Armenian-controlled capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. Each side accused the other of targeting civilians while denying carrying out any attacks itself on residential areas.

The conflict has set off alarms about the risks of a wider war and put the United States, with its large and politically influential Armenian diaspora, in the uncomfortable position of watching Turkey, a vital NATO ally, deploying F-16 jets in support of Armenia’s enemies.

“The United States,” Pashinyan said, “needs to explain whether it gave those F-16s to bomb peaceful villages and peaceful populations.” He said that O’Brien had “heard and acknowledged” his concerns and promised to set up a phone conversation between the Armenian leader and Trump.

That opportunity to rally the United States to Armenia’s side vanished just a few hours later when Trump announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.

But Trump’s health issues, analysts say, have only accentuated his administration’s disengagement from a conflict that offers no easy diplomatic victories. The Trump administration, distracted by other bigger issues like China, has “simply not been paying attention and been completely disengaged,” said Thomas de Waal, a British expert on the region and author of a book on Nagorno-Karabakh, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War.