Father of Fallen Soldier: 'We Still Have Bodies There, God Forbid We Don't Retrieve Them'

“We all realize that we still have bodies there; we want to urge that negotiations be intensified with the other side,” said the father of a fallen soldier during a protest action for missing servicemen on February 6.

“I spoke with Karen Arustamyan on October 4-5, asking for help since I had lost contact with my son. He responded very poorly and then turned off his phone. After that, the Ministry of Defense responded that they had contacted my son's unit on October 8. I proved to them that this was not the case, after which they replied that they had been in contact on the 5th, but once again, they lied because the unit had perished due to the infiltration of a diversion group on the night of the 2nd, which included my son. There was also a captive from there who narrated everything.

That person, who was the commander of the motorized rifle division from the engineering service, caused so many losses and surrendered land due to his incompetence. This blood is on his hands due to his mistakes because his knowledge fails him as a commander. This suffering he and similar high and low-ranking commanders have caused us will not go unaccounted for.

So what does this mean? We are surrendering land, but we are not retreating to reduce casualties; rather, we are incurring losses of a counter-offensive scale and to this day, no one has been held accountable.

That means our army was entirely correct during this war, but for some reason, we lost all the battles. In that case, the error was due to lack of weaponry.

We want to meet with the Minister of Defense, present our demands once again, and ask that our actions start moving a bit quicker. We, as parents, have brought this process to this stage; we managed to retrieve nearly 1400 bodies after the war, but now there are various issues regarding the missing persons that we can solve. This is the work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but we have come together as parents to reach the point of making proposals.

We all understand that we still have bodies there, and God forbid that we do not retrieve those bodies for this command structure. We want to urge that negotiations with the other side start to progress more rapidly,” he stated.