"I want the world to see through my eyes what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh," says Anna Khachatryan. That's why she is now sharing her story – that of her expulsion from her homeland.

The dark-haired woman, 36 years old, is sitting on the seventh floor of a hotel together with her husband, four children, grandmother and great-grandmother. She arrived here the day before, in the Armenian provincial town of Goris: the temporary end of a hasty escape from Nagorno-Karabakh, from the self-administered Armenian republic not recognized by the international community that is located in Azerbaijani territory.

Outside, in front of the hotel, scenes of a biblical-like exodus are playing out: People squeeze out of overcrowded minibuses and cars around the clock, stuffing their remaining belongings into plastic bags and suitcases.

All Are Fleeing

From frail old men to toddlers, everyone is getting out. Late at night, refugees are still desperately looking for a place to stay in this city of 20,000.

Inside the hotel, Khachatryan is struggling to keep her composure as she talks about her life. It's a narrative that begins and ends with the word "war," a story that reveals the tragedy of the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The majority Armenian-populated area, a would-be state not recognized internationally, surrendered to Azerbaijani autocrat Ilham Aliyev after a lightning strike that began on September 19. More than half of all residents have since fled.

On Thursday it was announced that Nagorno-Karabakh as an entity would be dissolved by the end of the year. There is nothing to suggest that residents will be able to return.

Anna was four when she arrived in what was then a Soviet autonomous region. The giant empire of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was on its last legs. In the struggle for a post-Soviet order, war had broken out between the South Caucasian republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, primarily over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

It was reason enough for Anna's father, a native of Nagorno-Karabakh, to enlist at the front. He wanted to fight for the independence of his homeland, an area sacred to Armenians as a cultural landscape: They had settled there even prior to the birth of Christ, a thousand years before the first caliph appeared in the region.

It took until 1994 for the Christian Armenians to prevail in their longed for victory over the Muslim Azerbaijanis, whose language is related to Turkish.

A Conflict Spirals Out of Control

Tens of thousands died on both sides in that war. Khachatryan's father lost two of his brothers.

"The road we used to drive into the war zone in 1991, to Nagorno-Karabakh, is the same one we used to flee to Armenia yesterday," says Anna Khachatryan. She sounds like she's watching a movie rewind to the beginning. Her life reads like the chronicle of a conflict that spun out of control.

Only months after Anna's birth, in August 1987, the Karabakh Armenians petitioned Gorbachev for the region to become part of Armenia. Wars followed, massacres perpetrated by both sides, a never-ending spiral of violence. And now? It appears as though the final battle for Nagorno-Karabakh was fought last Tuesday.

Anna Khachatryan says life in Nagorno-Karabakh wasn't bad. She worked as a pharmacist there, while her husband, a lawyer by training, served in the military.

A Mercedes and a Lexus

There was no lack of money, and a Mercedes and a Lexus were parked in front of the house on Sasuntsi Davit Street, located near the market in the capital city of Stepanakert.

It wasn't until a shell hit in the immediate vicinity of the Khachatryans in the autumn war of 2020, so that "even the window panes in our house shook," not until their five-month-old daughter Magdalena began to have breathing problems in the bunker and the supplies in the pharmacy began to run low – did Anna Khachatryan, her husband and their older children realize that their lives in Nagorno-Karabakh were threatened.

The rebel republic, known as "Artsakh" by Armenians, lost a third of its territory in the 2020 Azerbaijani advance - fighting that cost the lives of another 6,000 people in the battle for Nagorno-Karabakh. The cease-fire, negotiated by the Russians, resulted in Azerbaijani troops posted barely 10 kilometers from the Khachatryans' home.

A little over two years later, on December 12, 2022, the blockade of the Lachin Corridor began. The road leading to Armenia was a lifeline for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. Everything needed to endure in the hostile environment came from the Armenian motherland via that one road, the asphalt equivalent of an umbilical cord.

The emergency began when the Aliyev regime ordered the closure of the corridor. "We ran out of medications pretty quickly at the pharmacy, especially blood pressure-lowering drugs and blood thinners," Khachatryan says.

Bulgar and and Marmelade

For the first six months, the situation was bearable because supplies of medicine and food could be obtained from Armenia via an alternative road through the forest. It was extremely expensive, but it did the job. Then the Azerbaijanis put an end to that as well.

"We ran out of cooking oil in June," Khachatryan says. "We lived on our supplies. I made bread with my own hands from low-quality grain meal, we ate fig or strawberry jam. The electricity was usually only available for two hours at a time."

By mid-September, the rebel republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, placed under a stranglehold by Azerbaijan, was threatened with famine. The European Union contented itself with polite outrage; anything more would have lacked credibility: One year earlier, at the peak of the energy crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had praised the "reliable partnership" with Ilham Aliyev and suggested that the "excellent relations" would be further deepened.

And Vladimir Putin? On September 12, the Kremlin chief uttered a sentence in Vladivostok that at first attracted little attention. He said that he hoped an early solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh problem would be smooth – if possible "without ethnic cleansing."

A week later, the first bullets struck Stepanakert, and the bulk of the Armenians fled.

Anna Khachatryan says she was at home alone when Azerbaijan's "anti-terrorist operation" began on Tuesday, September 19. She says her husband was with the troops, two of her children were in daycare and the other two at school. At 12:50 p.m., the first heavy explosions shook Stepanakert.

Khachatryan immediately set off to pick up her youngest child. The daughter cried and trembled. By 3 p.m. that afternoon, they were all together again. Under the cover of darkness, the family moved together to the sister's basement. She also has three children.

Children Count the Shell Impacts

The seven girls and boys stayed awake until 3 a.m., Khachatryan says. They whiled away the time by counting shell impacts. And they prayed for their fathers at the front, both of whom had been wounded already in the earlier war.

The older children laid on tarpaulins, the linens from old Soviet cots, and the adults sat up awake all night. There was no electricity, no internet and no news. Fears spread that the Azerbaijanis had already long since entered the city.

The next day, the house no longer had any running water. They kept themselves fed in the basement with pita bread and leftover kurkut, a stew of meat and bulgar.

The family only learned about the end of the operation at noon three days later from acquaintances. After another night in the basement, the Khachatryans returned to their home, where their father joined them. When the children weren't listening, the parents spoke about missing relatives and fatalities: The brother of a sister-in-law had been killed by a sniper, and two of the sons' schoolmates had died.

On the evening of September 22, a Friday, the family decided to flee Nagorno-Karabakh. But the corridor was still closed. "We still didn't have electricity or anything to eat, and the state and its institutions no longer existed," says Anna Khachatryan. When schools began issuing report cards for the instructional year that had just begun, she says, it was clear that "this is the end."

"I Hate the Turks"

It's Sunday morning in the Armenian border village of Aravus, on the other side of the Lachin Corridor, which looks like an ordinary road from up here. It is the day the exodus will begin, but the passage is still blocked on this morning – for Anna Khachatryan and for tens of thousands of residents of Nagorno-Karabakh who want to flee to Armenia.

"I hate the Turks" – a reference to the Azerbaijanis – says one of the Armenians standing guard at the border here in Aravus at an altitude of 1,400 meters (4,600 feet). The civilian defenders have gathered in the home of the village elder. They wear flak jackets or simple camouflage clothing, their Kalashnikovs are casually leaning against the wall, and there are pictures of Jesus on the cases of their mobile phones.

They agree on their core beliefs. One says: "Armenians and Azerbaijanis, it's like fire and water; that's why the compatriots from Nagorno-Karabakh will all end up coming to us – because what Aliyev is offering them for staying sounds like forced integration."

The village guards from Aravus suggest climbing a nearby hill, where there is a good view across the border between the hostile states.

"We're surrounded now by 13 positions of the Azerbaijani army," one of the men says, pointing his arm to the north. "They gradually took 68 acres of pasture and farmland from us; land where we harvested wheat and barley, grazed our cows and sheep."

During the Soviet times, there were no fixed borders between the republics here, just maps showing the outlines of individual municipalities. That went well for decades after the breakup of the Soviet Union, he says, "but then, almost three decades later, the Azerbaijanis came up with Google Maps and suddenly said: This and that are ours now." The Armenians, by now dramatically outnumbered militarily, couldn't defend themselves.

Not in Aravus and not elsewhere. The Azerbaijani military apparatus, fed by billions of dollars in oil and gas, including money from Western sources, is slowly eating its way into Armenian territory. Between 150 and 215 square kilometers of territory, depending on estimates and the type of satellite imagery analyzed, are believed to have been secretly occupied by Baku's forces since 2020.

Burning Uniforms

Shortly before the battle for Stepanakert got underway, Anna says, she took charge of the household. She told everyone they could pack just one change of clothing, no more. One suitcase would have to suffice for the entire family. Jewelry and documents were to go in one small bag. The family photos were too heavy, so they burned most of them.

They also burned her husband's uniforms. It's important not to leave any traces behind. And they buried the medals for bravery Anna's husband had earned as a veteran of multiple wars.

They then headed in the Mercedes and the Lexus to the airport, where the Russians were stationed. The Khachatryans left the cars. "Maybe someone can use them later."

The family was fortunate. Whether it's because of the cars they essentially gave away, their four children in tow, or just chance, the Khachatryans were waved forward by the Russian soldiers, and at 1 p.m., they were on the bus to Armenia. At the checkpoint, there was a brief shock – a last bit of cruelty from the victorious power. The adult Armenian men were taken off the bus and told they had to cross the border on foot. Fear quickly spread that the men of military age were to be separated from their families.

Children on the bus started screaming. Anna Khachatryan says she fought back the panic as it began to build. "My last image of Nagorno-Karabakh will forever be this Azerbaijani soldier taking my husband off the bus – there was no room at all for any other emotions," she says. In the end, though, everything turned out fine. The men marched across the border on foot and the families were reunited on Armenian soil.

In the following days, satellite images would show the enormous exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh; miles-long lines of cars, often filling multiple lanes, could be seen crawling their way through the Lachin Corridor on the way to Goris.

Anna Khachatryan was born in Kapan in 1987, on the Armenian side. In the future, if she wanted to visit her birthplace from Goris, she would have to take a long detour through the rugged mountainous terrain.

The direct road to the city is no longer passable. The route zigzags a total of 28 times across the border between the two republics. Azerbaijani and Russian troops have blocked the road to Kapan since the 44-day war in the fall of 2020, when the now highly equipped Azerbaijani army inflicted a devastating defeat on the Armenians.

The village of Shurnukh, for example, located 27 kilometers north of Khachatryan's birthplace, is now divided and accessible only with a special permit.

An iron cross marks the outermost position of the defenders commanded from the Armenian capital of Yerevan. Not 200 meters away are Azerbaijan's troops and the Kremlin's armed scouts.

Traditionally, the Russians have been Armenia's allies in the region, with Turkey siding with Azerbaijan. Russian peacekeepers stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh, however, have recently barely lifted a hand to slow the Azerbaijani advance.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has sought to distance himself from Moscow in recent years. But Putin knows that Armenia is reliant on Russian gas and will be dependent on Moscow's military assistance in the long run. Meanwhile, NATO is making no effort to create another problem for itself in the region.

Is an Invasion of Armenia Next?

Yerevan, meanwhile, is threatened with yet another calamity in the near future if Azerbaijan advances into Armenian territory.

"I see a probability at 50 percent that Azerbaijani troops will invade us no later than spring to force an extraterritorial corridor across Nakhchivan toward Turkey," says Benyamin Poghosyan, a defense expert at the think tank APRI in Yerevan.