BY ELLEN MITCHELL,

Israel’s military is preparing for the possibility that the Trump administration will launch a military strike against Iran, Axios reported on Wednesday.

Senior Israeli officials told the outlet that the Israeli government instructed military commanders to prepare for a potential strike during the “very sensitive period” between now and when President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20.

Israel is reportedly making preparations with the expectation that they would receive advance notice from the U.S. regarding any military action, but with concerns that such notification might come too close to the attack.

Israel is also preparing for the possibility of a retaliatory strike by Iran, either directly or through proxies in nearby countries.

The New York Times reported last week that President Trump was considering a military strike against Iran in an attempt to stop Tehran’s growing nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency a day earlier had reported that the country’s uranium stockpile was 12 times higher than allowed under the Obama-era nuclear deal that the Trump administration withdrew from in 2018.

Trump reportedly held a meeting Thursday in the Oval Office to discuss his options, but Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dissuaded him against such actions.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz has spoken twice over the past two weeks with Miller to discuss Iran, Syria and defense cooperation.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Saudi Arabia with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The main topic of conversation was Iran, Israeli officials told Axios.

State Department officials, meanwhile, told reporters that “all options are on the table,” regarding Iran.

Tensions between Washington and Tehran have been high since January, when Trump ordered a drone strike in Baghdad that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

U.S. Central Command head Gen. Frank McKenzie said last week that destabilizing actions by Iran have continued and “increased in scope and severity” since 2019.

Source: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/527542-israeli-military-instructed-to-prepare-for-trump-strike-on-iran-report

Since November 13, Russian peacekeepers have been carrying out an active humanitarian mission to search for the bodies of those killed and missing in Nagorno-Karabakh. This was reported by Русская весна.

The event is organized jointly by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Nagorno Karabakh, Armenian and Azerbaijani servicemen.

During the first week, more than 2,000 bodies were found in the city of Shushi, which were handed over to each side. In addition, the Stepanakert-Goris road was completely cleared of damaged equipment in just one week, and on November 17, the Lachin corridor was opened for the safe transportation of refugees from Yerevan through Goris to Stepanakert. On November 22, the search and exchange of bodies in the Martuni region was completed.

Source: https://rusvesna.su/news/1606301644

Two weeks after a Moscow-brokered truce and with returnees and evacuees still flowing to and from Nagorno-Karabakh — the center of an abruptly “unfrozen” conflict two months ago — the anguished families of missing Azerbaijani soldiers are scrambling for news of their loved ones.

“I was told by the [Defense Ministry] hotline that he wasn’t among the injured,” a cousin of Yahya Abdinov, a 21-year-old soldier from the eastern Azerbaijani city of Shirvan, said on November 18.There are estimates of possibly thousands of Azerbaijani dead. But no one outside the halls of power…knows for sure.

“Everyone says different things,” the cousin, Saday Tagiyev, told RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service. “One person says he’s alive and doing his service, another says he’s somewhere where there’s no [mobile-phone] network so he can’t make a call. We’re lost. We can’t get accurate information.”

This week, the family still had no idea what had happened to Abdinov or whether he was even alive.

As fresh graves are dug and filled, and coffins are lain in “martyrs’ allies” in Baku and other cities as bodies are returned from the battlefields in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, there are estimates of possibly thousands of Azerbaijani dead.

But no one outside the halls of power of this strategically located Caucasus nation that has been locked in a “frozen conflict” with neighboring Armenia for decades knows for sure.

‘We Don’t Have Protests’

Authoritarian Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s already secretive government remains silent about overall casualty figures from six weeks of intense fighting after it kicked off an offensive on September 27. 

Officials refuse to answer journalists’ questions about specific cases, too.

So parents and cousins still regularly crowd lists of the wounded hung outside hospitals in the capital, Baku. Multiple accounts suggest the Defense Ministry hotlines mostly take down information and urge patience.

The problem extends to a lesser degree in Armenia, where Yerevan has reported more than 2,400 war dead and hundreds of others either missing or still to be identified.

In the capital, there are scenes showing throngs of angry Armenians outside official buildings.

There, desperate family members have demanded answers from a government under political siege since the weapons went silent with Azerbaijan back in control of about two-thirds of the Azerbaijani territory held since 1994 by ethnic Armenians.

But in the streets of Baku, despite unofficial suggestions that at least hundreds of troops are still unaccounted for, there are seemingly no public signs of anger.

“We don’t have protests against the government regarding this issue,” a journalist in Baku said bluntly.

History Repeating Itself?

Aliyev has kept a tight lid on state-dominated media since taking over from his ailing father in 2003, and his administration has been accused of routinely jailing its critics.

It already ranked 168th out of 180 countries on watchdog Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) press freedom index earlier this year. 

But martial law declared on September 28 has allowed authorities to impose even stricter limits on what people can say or report about the conflict. 

“The Azerbaijani public will be informed of it after the completion of the active phase of military operations,” Aliyev told Russian television at the height of the conflict.

Information hasn’t emerged since the November 10 cease-fire that was widely seen as a victory for Baku in the region’s most intense fighting since the first war ended in 1994, however.

Legacy Of Missing Fighters

Many Azerbaijanis are acutely aware from the 1988-94 conflict that killed as many as 30,000 people of the confusion that can accompany the fight for a sliver of land that went from heavily Azeri to almost exclusively ethnic Armenian.

Hundreds of thousands of Azeris who fled that violence were displaced after the shaky cease-fire of 1994 left nearly all of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding districts in the hands of ethnic Armenians.

Thousands more — troops and civilians — have been unaccounted for since the guns fell silent then.

An Azerbaijani state working group on prisoners of war, hostages, and missing persons established during the war by then-President Heydar Aliyev — Ilham Aliyev’s father — concluded in 2008 that the whereabouts of more than 4,200 people were still unknown.

While Azerbaijan’s fighting forces were generally better equipped and trained and made ample use of unmanned attack drones in the most recent campaign, attacking and dislodging entrenched forces tends to incur higher casualties than defending territory.

Through A Looking Glass

The Armenian side has been more forthcoming about its casualties. It has confirmed the deaths of some 2,400 troops so far.

But many of its missing are in districts that fell into the hands of Azerbaijani forces before the November 19 cease-fire, suggesting that some are still being held prisoner. 

The comparative openness of the Armenian government, which is already under tremendous political pressure from Armenians who regard the loss of territory and cease-fire as humiliating national defeats, has not completely insulated it from criticism.

In Yerevan, the families of dozens of Armenian men still missing have gathered almost nightly in front of the Defense Ministry building to appeal for news of their whereabouts. 

Armenian officials from Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on down have publicly addressed demands for more information about the missing, including meeting with family members protesting outside state buildings.

On November 23, relatives of the missing congregated outside the Russian Embassy in Yerevan to appeal for help from Moscow — and its 2,000 or so peacekeepers deployed in the area — to help find survivors and identify casualties.

The Armenian Defense Ministry claimed on October 23 that it believed Azerbaijani military casualties were nearing the 10,000 mark, although there is no way of corroborating that figure.

Both Azerbaijani and ethnic Armenian representatives continue to work with international humanitarian groups like the Red Cross on prisoner swaps and to find the missing, including scouring the frequently scorched theaters of particularly brutal battles for remains.

Dashed Hopes

Underscoring the ongoing challenges of retrieving battlefield casualties two weeks after the cease-fire, a land mine exploded as a local and international contingent was searching for the remains of missing Azerbaijani and Armenian soldiers near the Tartar district northeast of Nagorno-Karabakh on November 23.

The blast killed one Azerbaijani officer and injured four ethnic Armenian representatives and a Russian peacekeeper.

That is roughy the same area where a 21-year-old conscript, Rovshan Ismayilov, went missing in a nighttime battle around Agdara (known in Armenian as Martakert) in mid-October.

Weeks after the end of the fighting, in mid-November, Ismayilov’s family in Baku still had not heard anything since last talking to him on October 12. His military unit confirmed only that he had been sent to the front, according to a friend.

His aunt, Khadija Ismayilova, one of Azerbaijan’s best-known investigative reporters and a former RFE/RL employee, was as helpless as the rest of the family.

She spent a month trying to help her brother find his son. Ismayilova crowdsourced an image of troops in the area where they suspected Rovshan was deployed in hopes of identifying him among the green-helmeted young men. Others shared images and fragmentary information suggesting the bodies of others serving alongside Rovshan had been found.

The confirmation of his death came on November 18.

“Our boy, Rovshan, was listed as missing because bodies were left on the battlefield in territory occupied by Armenia and attempts to get them resulted in more casualties,” Ismayilova told RFE/RL. “When the bodies were recovered after the cease-fire — almost a month after the battle — most of them were unrecognizable because they were burned — killed, then burned.” 

A day later, his body was buried alongside other casualties of Azerbaijan’s three-decade-long war with Armenia in the Bilacari cemetery’s Alley of Martyrs, in a neighborhood of Baku.

Written and reported by Andy Heil based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service

Artsakh’s Karvachar District became the second territory to be handed over to Azerbaijan as part of an agreement that ended military hostilities, but forced the surrender of territory to Baku.

At midnight Wednesday local time the entrance to Artsakh along the famed Vardenis-Mardakert Highway was closed. Barricades emblazoned with the Armenian tri-color lined the sides of the highway, while a sign welcoming visitors to Artsakh remained standing, despite earlier reports that it was being dismantled. The sign will presumably serve as a check point.

It was pandemonium as Karvachar residents and last of the Artsakh soldiers rushed to evacuate the territory they have called home.

Many residents burned their houses and places of business down to the ground, while the soldier of the Armed Forces set their military barracks on fire so that Azerbaijanis occupiers do not use the facilities.

Sputnik-Armenia correspondent Nana Martrosyan observed that both sides of the highway were jammed with cars. On the one hand, residents of Karvachar were leaving for Stepanakert, and on the side people visiting the 9th-century Dadivank Monastery for one last time were returning to Armenia.

The construction of the highway was entirely funded by the Armenia Fund, through whose telethons the needed money was raised by Armenians from Armenia and Diaspora. It was inaugurated in 2017 providing a second access from Armenia to Artsakh. Now, however, the road that traversed through the gigantic boulders of Karvachar and snaked alongside the Terter river and through the lush Artsakh forests into Stepanakert will remain untraversed by Armenians.

The only route from Armenia to Artsakh will be the Goris-Stepanakert highway, also constructed by the Armenia Fund. However a turnabout that would take passengers to Shushi will be off limits.

This is the new reality facing beleaguered people of Artsakh.

“We stayed here until the end. We were here throughout the war and we did not surrender anything to the enemy,” said the soldiers of the Artsakh Armed Forces, who were leaving Karvachar.

MOSCOW: Russia’s Federal Security Service said on Wednesday it had thwarted “terror” attacks planned by Daesh in the Moscow region, uncovering and breaking up a militant cell, the RIA news agency said.
Security officers detained one person and seized a home-made bomb, the FSB was quoted as saying.

Today, November 25, marks the birthday anniversary of National Hero of Armenia and Artsakh, legendary commander, philosopher and warrior Monte Melkonian. He would have turned 63 today.

Monte Melkonian was born in 1957 at Visalia Municipal Hospital in Visalia, California to Charles and Zabel Melkonian. He was the third of four children born to a self-employed cabinetmaker and an elementary-school teacher. By all accounts, Melkonian was described as an all-American child who joined the Boy Scouts and was a pitcher in Little League baseball. Melkonian’s parents rarely talked about their Armenian heritage with their children, often referring to the place of their ancestors as the “Old Country.”

In the spring of that year, the family also traveled across Turkey to visit the town of Merzifon, where Melkonian’s maternal grandparents were from. Merzifon’s population at the time was 23,475 but was almost completely devoid of its once 17,000-strong Armenian population that was wiped out during the Armenian Genocide in 1915. They did find one Armenian family of the three that was living in the town, however, Melkonian soon learned that the only reason this was so, was because the head of the family in 1915 had exchanged the safety of his family in return for identifying all the Armenians in the town to Turkish authorities during the genocide. Monte would later confide to his wife that “he was never the same after that visit….He saw the place that had been lost.”

Upon his return to California Monte returned to his education. In high school, he was exceeding all standards and having a hard time finding new academic challenges. Instead of graduating high school early, as was suggested by his principal, Monte found an alternative thanks to his father: a study abroad program in East Asia. At the age of 15 Monte traveled to Japan for a new chapter in his young life. While there he began making money teaching English which helped finance his travels through several Southeast Asian countries. This introduced him to several new cultures, new philosophies, new languages, and in several cases, like his travels through Vietnam, new skills that would become immensely valuable in his later life as a soldier. Returning to the United States, he graduated from high school and entered the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in ancient Asian history and Archeology. In 1978 he helped to organize an exhibition of Armenian cultural artifacts at one of the university’s libraries. The section of the exhibit dealing with the 1915-23 genocide was removed by university authorities, at the request of the Turkish consul general in San Francisco. The display that was removed was eventually reinstalled following a campus protest movement. Monte eventually completed his undergrad work in under three years. Upon graduating, he was accepted into the archeology graduate program at the University of Oxford. However, Monte chose to forgo this opportunity, and instead chose to begin his lifelong struggle for the Armenian Cause.

On October 6, 1990, Monte arrived in what was then still Soviet Armenia. During the first 8 months in Armenia, Melkonian worked in the Armenian Academy of Sciences, where he prepared an archaeological research monograph on Urartian cave tombs, which was posthumously published. Seta and Monte were married at the monastery of Geghart in August 1991.

Finding himself on Armenian soil after many years, he wrote in a letter that he found a lot of confusion among his compatriots. Armenia faced enormous economic, political and environmental problems at every turn, problems that had festered for decades. New political forces bent on dismantling the Soviet Union were taking Armenia in a direction that Monte believed was bound to exacerbate the crisis and produce more problems.

Under these circumstances, it quickly became clear to Monte that, for better or for worse, the Soviet Union had no future and the coming years would be perilous ones for the Armenian people. He then focused his energy on Nagorno-Karabakh. “If we lose Karabakh,” the bulletin of the Karabakh Defense Forces quoted him as saying, “we turn the final page of the Armenian history.” He believed that, if Azeri forces succeeded in deporting Armenians from Karabakh, they would advance on Zangezur and other regions of Armenia. Thus, he saw the fate of Karabakh as crucial for the long-term security of the entire Armenian nation.

On September 12 (or 14) 1991 Monte travelled to Shahumian region (north of Nagorno-Karabakh), where he fought for three months in the fall of 1991. There he participated in the capture of Erkej, Manashid and Buzlukh villages.

On February 4, 1992 Melkonian arrived in Martuni as the regional commander. Upon his arrival the changes were immediately felt: civilians started feeling more secure and at peace as Azeri armies were pushed back and were finding it increasingly difficult to shell Martuni’s residential areas with GRAD missiles.

In April 1993, Melkonian was one of the chief military strategists who planned and led the operation to fight Azeri fighters and capture the region of Kalbajar of Azerbaijan which lies between the Republic of Armenia and former NKAO. Armenian forces captured the region in four days of heavy fighting, sustaining far fewer fatalities than the enemy.

Monte was killed in the abandoned Azerbaijani village of Merzili in the early afternoon of June 12, 1993 during the Battle of Aghdam. According to Markar Melkonian, Monte’s older brother and author of his biography, Monte died in the waning hours of the evening by enemy fire during an unexpected skirmish that broke out with several Azerbaijani soldiers who had gotten lost. Monte died in the arms of his closest and most trusted comrades.

Monte was buried with full military honors on June 19, 1993 at Yerablur military cemetery in Yerevan. According to one estimate, some 25,000 people filed past his open casket as it lay in state at the Officer’s Hall in the Armenian capital. 

Incidentally, Karvachar region was handed over to Azerbaijan on the birthday of its liberator. According to the November 9 joint statement of the Armenian prime minister and the presidents of Azerbaijan and Russia, Armenia was set to return Artsakh’s Karvachar region to Azerbaijan by November 15, but the deadline for the withdrawal of Armenian civilians from the region was extended until November 25.