(ABC NEWS) — MOSCOW — The president of Azerbaijan is promising that Christian churches will be protected when the strongly Muslim country takes possession of areas formerly controlled by Armenians, as residents burned down their homes and fled in cars and trucks ahead of Sunday’s expected takeover.
President Ilham Aliyev’s office said he made the promise in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is deploying peacekeeping forces in the areas under an agreement that ended six weeks of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Ethnic Armenian forces had controlled Nagorno-Karabakh and sizeable adjacent territories since 1994, after the end of a separatist war.
