Karabakh rivals urged to spare civilians

BARDA, Azerbaijan: The head of a Red Cross mission monitoring the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict called on Thursday for all parties to stop shelling civilians and respect international law in fighting that has killed nearly 1,000 people.

Gerardo Moloeznik also told AFP that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) stood ready to help the bitter foes Azerbaijan and Armenia repatriate bodies for burial at home.

His comments came a day after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan ruled out a diplomatic solution to the bloodiest clashes over the disputed region since a post-Soviet war killed 30,000 and ended in a fragile truce.

"We insist that the sides to the conflict comply with international humanitarian law," Moloeznik said in an interview at the ICRC’s walled-off headquarters in Azerbaijan’s frontline region town of Barda. "This is very important. They have to spare the lives of civilians, civilian infrastructure, because there have been situations in which they have been using heavy artillery in populated areas."