Azerbaijan will allow UN experts to visit Karabakh 'in matter of days' - presidential office

[September 29, 2023]  BAKU (Reuters) -Azerbaijan intends to allow a group of experts from the United Nations to visit the Karabakh region "in a matter of days", the office of a presidential adviser said on Friday. 

Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh region arrive in the border village of Kornidzor, Armenia, September 29, 2023. REUTERS/Irakli Gedenidze

Media will also have a chance to visit Karabakh, it said, as the number of ethnic Armenians fleeing the region following Azerbaijan's lightning military offensive there reached nearly 90,000, out of an estimated population of 120,000.

The United States and others have called on Baku to allow international monitors into Karabakh, amid concerns about possible human rights abuses. Armenia has accused Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing in Karabakh, something Baku strongly denies.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has said the rights of Karabakh's Armenians would be fully respected but that his "iron fist" had consigned the idea of an independent ethnic Armenian Karaabakh to history.

Aliyev told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a phone call on Tuesday that his forces had targeted only "military facilities... during the anti-terror measures, which lasted less than 24 hours, and civilians were not harmed", according to a statement from the Azeri president's office.

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Alex Richardson and Christina Fincher)

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