WEST FARGO — Growing up in Azerbaijan, Kamala Gasimli's fondest memories are of her family’s farm blooming with walnut, fig and pomegranate trees, and the sweetest tomatoes she’s ever eaten. In the warmer months she woke up every morning with a flower on her pillow, placed there by her father.
Her last memory of her mountainous homeland is the flames, and terror.
“Everything was in the fire, there was fire everywhere and when I looked back, I could see how everything was burning,” Gasimli said before tears left her speechless.
At 19 years old, she and her family members packed themselves into a pickup truck and fled from the Nagorno-Karabakh village of Jabrayil to Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan. War between Armenia and Azerbaijan had broken out, making her family refugees.
Sadly for Gasimli and her husband, Azer Akhmedov, who now live in West Fargo, war has erupted again along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border.
Two weeks ago, Azerbaijan began reportedly attacking districts around the Nagorno-Karabakh region with precision missile strikes, and has taken some areas back that were part of Azerbaijan during the Soviet era, according to news reports.
Although Gasimli and her husband do not want war with Armenia, they’re hopeful that one day soon they can go back to visit.
“For 27 years I have not seen my village, and I dream of my village every single month,” said Akhmedov, a local university professor. “Now my village is liberated as of October 4 — 27 years after it was invaded.”
Tensions in the region go back thousands of years. Times of war and conquest were followed by peace, with Azerbaijanis and Armenians living quietly as neighbors. The most recent violence has centered on the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which lies within Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians.
Two years of war followed the Soviet Union’s collapse, and tensions disintegrated into a series of pogroms against Armenians. The ethnic violence in the 1990s sent Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, an Armenian, and her family, running for their lives from Baku, Azerbaijan's capital city.
Turcotte wrote about her life on the run from 1993 to 1994 in a childhood diary. Later, she transformed her diary into a book entitled "Nowhere, a Story of Exile."
“I wrote it from the heart when I was sitting in Wahpeton, North Dakota,” said Turcotte, who once lived there but now lives in Maine. “I became a refugee because of the same aggression we’re seeing now.”
Her fondest childhood memories are of her family and the Armenian community in Baku. “That’s one thing they took away that can’t be quantified. We are spread all over the world. The cousins I have in Russia are now strangers to me,” Turcotte said.
There's little that Armenians and Azerbaijanis seem to agree on, but both sides do agree that religion, as Azerbaijan is mostly Muslim and Armenia is mostly Christian, is not the main reason for the current hostilities.
Turcotte said she has family who are fighting on the front lines. She knows they’re still alive, but she said she has friends, one a diplomat and another an opera singer, who have been killed because of recent violence.
Since Sept. 27 when the conflict began, she said she's gotten about three hours of sleep a night.
“Imagine how you felt on 9/11. That is how we feel every day since September 27," Turcotte said. "I’ve raised more than $100,000 for refugees and for sleeping bags for troops and medical aid for victims. I’m constantly working, and I’m not stopping until they stop bombing."
The U.S. embassy in Armenia has called for a cessation of hostility, and for a return to the negotiating table. Another life-threatening issue in the two countries is the coronavirus, which is spreading faster because of the conflict.
Fariz Huseynov left Azerbaijan to come to the United States for education reasons and is now a professor who lives in West Fargo.
As a child, Huseynov’s chess teacher was an Armenian in Azerbaijan. Huseynov, too, doesn’t want war, but feels that Armenia has been breaking promises for 30 years.
“Our government says we’re not fighting Armenia, we’re fighting to get our lands,” Huseynov said.
Like Akhmedov's family, Huseynov is following the conflict online and through information from the military.
Akhmedov said the Azerbaijani military is winning and is more technologically advanced with the use of precise military strikes by drones. “I don’t want to see the Armenian army being destroyed. It doesn’t feel right when these people could have lived,” Akhmedov said.
Three decades ago, it was the Azerbaijani fighters who suffered defeat, which left a scar on the country’s psyche.
“Because of those losses, people couldn’t fight for their rights. They realized that democratic ideas had such a huge hit because we lost our lands, and Western world didn’t help get our lands back through peace,” Akhmedov said.
"Both sides have their truths and both sides have aspirations," he said. "We used to live together; peace will happen again."