The Azerbaijani officer who decapitated Artsakh soldier Kyaram Sloyan has become a national hero in Azerbaijan, after that country’s president, Ilham Aliyev awarded him a medal on Sunday when he and his wife, Mehriban, toured the border regions.
The Sloyan family, who call Artshavan village in central Armenia home, have had to endure yet another humiliation as they mourn theirs son, who would have turned 20 last Wednesday. First, they buried their decapitated son, who was killed during the savage attacks by Azerbaijan that began on April 2. Then they had to re-inter him several days later, after his head was returned to them when the International Committee of the Red Cross conducted an exchange of remains, all of which were reportedly severely mutilated. And now, the person responsible for their son’s death is being hailed as a hero.
They also had to endure images that surfaced on social media of their son’s decapitated head being paraded around as a prize by the newly-minted Azerbaijani hero and his fellow soldiers.
Of course, this has become common practice for the Aliyev regime. After all he also proclaimed Ramil Safarov, who murdered the Armenian soldier Gurgen Margaryan with an ax, a national hero.
Since the ICRC conducted an exchange of dead soldiers on April 11, reports of savage mutilation of Armenian soldiers by the Azerbaijani army have surfaced, with government officials in Armenia and Karabakh calling for an international investigation of Azerbaijan for war crimes.
Just last week, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, called for a “Leahy Law” investigation into reports that the Azerbaijan armed forces, which annually receive millions of dollars in U.S. military aid, committed gross violations of human rights during Baku’s April 2 offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh.
The office of the Human Rights Defender of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, Yuri Hairapetyan, published an Interim Public Report on the atrocities committed by the Azerbaijani Military Forces against the civilian population and the servicemen of Nagorno Karabakh between April 2 to 5, 2016.
“The most horrifying facts are the killings of peaceful civilians of Nagorno-Karabagh through cruel and inhuman methods of execution and mutilation. Similar practices of humiliation were applied in relation to members of the NKR Defense Army. Moreover, some of the NKR soldiers were, along with other forms of dismemberment, also subjected to beheading,” read the report. Several graphic images of the abuses were also published in the report.
The interim report details Azerbaijan’s policy of hatred and discrimination towards Armenians, including policies of spreading hate speech in Azerbaijani mass media and social networks, and their effects.
“The ISIS-style atrocities, deeply rooted in Azerbaijan’s state-supported propaganda of hatred and violence, gravely endanger the European human rights system as a whole. This situation threatens to escalate largely with unpredictable consequences if not effectively prevented and duly acted upon by the international community,” read the report.
Last week. the European Ombudsman Institute (EOI) published the aforementioned report on its website and officially condemned the Azerbaijani atrocities against Armenian civilian settlements and peaceful civilians. The EOI expressed its concern that the Artsakh civilians had been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment.
The EOI also highlighted the attacks initiated on civilian settlements, especially, schools and kindergartens and also intolerable inroads against children and old people, by noting that these actions are violating the European high values of human rights and principles of international humanitarian law.
The same body, on Monday, issued another report, which is the legal assessment on the facts of human shielding and use of indiscriminate weapons against the civilian population of Nagorno Karabakh by Azerbaijani military forces.
According to the Artsakh Human Rights Defender’s office, the “intentional deployment by Azerbaijan of its military units and artillery in the vicinity and within civilian settlements and using them as firing positions goes against the obligations imposed upon by the Geneva Convention (IV, Article 28) to which Azerbaijani is a State Party and which reflects fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, as well as other obligations under customary international law.”
Excellent article.
These are barbarian butchers!
How can the United States call this evil nation a friend shame on us!
Far worse than what is shown here should happen to this Azerbabooni coward, Safarov and chicken-hawk Aliyev himself. They should all be captured and be executed for the whole world to see what happens to Central Asian cowards who take pride in the decapitation of a dead soldier’s body, murder an unarmed man in his sleep and who promote racism and advocate violence against Armenians, respectively. Not just their heads but their limbs should also be cut off from their bodies with dull axes and manual saws. Keep their decapitated skulls as trophies and run the rest of their corpses through a meat grinder, gift-wrap them with a red bow and send them to their mothers and wife with a congratulatory note.
It never ceases to amaze me that the so-called “civilized” world looks the other way as this banana-nosed dictator commits war crime after war crime. The Minsk Group with its statements about shared blame, should be relegated to the scrap heap of failed appeasers, right next to Neville Chamberlain. Aliyev and his big brother Erdogan would kill every Armenian on Earth if given the opportunity. May we please stop dancing around the issue and speak the truth for a change?
Savages! Savages! Let the western powers, the so called “allies” of these turks open their eyes and see what kind of creatures they are sharing their bed with
Armenians should not fall to the instigations of this blood sucker corrupt Aliyev, seated in his palace he sends his young poor and ignorant soldiers to death, all he is worried is how to perpetuate his families stay in power and loot the country as long and as much as they can. seen in an interview, his daughters are as bitchy as their father, God help Armenia and the Azerbaijani people in the hands of these unscrupulous leaders.
Armenians should send the photo to Obama asking, had the head been his dauther’s head what he would have done?
animals. nothing more.
This is shocking proof of Baku’s ISIS connections, mentality and practice, and strongly brings to mind Ramil Safarov’s beheading of his fellow student, the Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan, in his sleep in his own bed, at a NATO Lagrange training course in Budapest in 2003. Safarov was likewise treated as hero by Aliev and given medals and honours for cowardly axing Margaryan’s head in his sleep, once Hungary had sent him to Baku, purportedly to serve the rest of his life term there. The mutilation of fallen soldiers and civilians’ bodies is a disgusting war crime and must be prosecuted as such.
We have to think smart and act smart.
There is no negotiations with the Azeri’s, and this article only proves that point. Unconditional hatred for the Turks / Azeri’s. Our fallen hero’s who fought for our fatherland and have given today’s generation a free Armenia must always be remembered. Images like this will only show the world that these Muslims / Turks are not part of the human race.