Azerbaijan police arrest dozens during anti-Armenia protest

Police in Azerbaijan have arrested dozens of protesters who broke into the country’s parliament building during a demonstration against Armenia.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, on Wednesday to show solidarity with the army, which suffered casualties during exchanges of fire with Armenia on the two countries’ border this week.

Demonstrators marched to the parliament building while holding national flags and chanting “Karabakh!” and “Our homeland is indivisible!”

Some of the protesters then attempted to enter the parliament building as the crowd became agitated, Reuters reported.

Police used rubber batons to stop them and arrested dozens. Their action did not appear to be intended as a protest against the authorities.

Eleven Azeri soldiers and a civilian, along with four Armenian troops, have been killed in clashes at the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia since Sunday.

Nine more troopers killed in new clashes on Armenia-Azerbaijan border

At least nine more troopers are killed on the third straight day of clashes between the armed forces of Azerbaijan and Armenia on their border.

The fighting has been the heaviest in years. Each side has accused the other of encroaching on its territory.

Azerbaijan has been engaged in a dispute with Armenia over Karabakh — a territory which broke away from Azerbaijan in a bloody war in the 1990s. Some 30,000 people were killed in the conflict, which ended with a fragile truce in 1994. In 2016, scores were killed in four days of renewed fighting.

The latest clashes occurred some 300 kilometers from the mountainous region.

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