from Thomson Reuters Foundation
"Many people are displaced but they are in areas that are highly militarised. There's a pressure that you have to be prepared, that war can explode at any time"
By Anna Pujol-Mazzini
TALISH, Azerbaijan, Oct 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Conflict can be long, slow and boring. Especially for the civilians stuck in its midst, living a half life that is neither full war nor genuine peace.
It is more than 20 years since a ceasefire formally ended fighting between ethnic Azeris and Armenians in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
But the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia have regularly traded accusations of violence around the territory and on their common border.
This means villagers in the Caucasian enclave – recognised as part of Azerbaijan but controlled by ethnic Armenians – cannot get back to their old peace-time existence any more than they can stay on a perpetual war footing.
Instead they are stuck in a no-man's land, as conflict sputters on around them.
New prefabricated housing has been delivered to replace abandoned homes.
Old landmines still erupt underfoot.
Home is a warm memory and the future is bleak and uncertain.
But it wasn't always like this.
Lida Sargsyan, an 82-year old ethnic Armenian, still remembers a time when Azeris and Armenians lived side by side.
"We used to live normally together," she recalled, standing on a dry patch of land where pigs and cows loll in the sun.
"The Azeris were living in our houses, we were living in their houses."
But that was decades ago – when the region was brought together under the Soviet Union – before war erupted in 1991.
By the time a truce was agreed three years later, some 30,000 people had been killed – including three of Sargsyan's sons – and a million people had been displaced.
Clashes over Nagorno-Karabakh have intensified in the past three years, and efforts to secure a permanent settlement have all failed. There are fears that the neighbours are now closer to war over the enclave than at any time since the ceasefire.
So when, in the early hours of April 3, 2016, Sargsyan heard gunshot in her frontline village of Talish, she knew an attack was imminent.
Still in her farm clothes, she jumped into her neighbour's car and they made for Armenia's capital, Yerevan, leaving behind her home, a husband and pictures of her three dead sons.
"We left the house without anything," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation as she tried to hold back tears.