What Baku Was Building in Artsakh: An Investigation by New Lines Magazine

Journalists and researchers Simon Maghakyan, Artyom Tonoyan, Siranush Sargsyan, and Lori Berberyan have presented an investigation in New Lines Magazine that reveals the Azerbaijani authorities have created a concentration camp in Artsakh, apparently to imprison the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The publication states: "'If they do not leave our land voluntarily, we will drive them out like dogs,' said Aliyev in a message to his people during the 2020 war. The goal that Aliyev has long pursued has now become a reality: the long-standing Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh, or as the Armenians call it, Artsakh, has come to an end. A meticulous analysis of the timeline preceding the September offensive shows how Azerbaijan's international partners have laid the groundwork for what prominent human rights defenders, such as former International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, have called a coordinated effort to terrorize Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and expel them from the region.

In September 2020, Azerbaijan waged war against Nagorno-Karabakh with the help of Turkish soldiers and Syrian mercenaries. Following the 2020 war, numerous reports have emerged of torture of Armenian prisoners of war by Azerbaijanis. The mutilations and rapes of Armenian women soldiers have been documented and published on social media by the Azerbaijani invading forces. In the fall of 2022, at least seven Armenian prisoners of war were executed unlawfully. In December 2022, after signing a broad alliance with Russia that included military cooperation, Azerbaijan closed the Lachin corridor. In September 2023, after a nine-month blockade, Nagorno-Karabakh was captured by Azerbaijan in a rapid military operation. The overwhelming majority of the region’s inhabitants fled to neighboring Armenia. Signs of impending invasion became noticeable after the Erdoğan-Putin meeting on September 4.

Last spring, Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh had heard the sounds of construction work and loud noises. From the village of Karmir Shuka, they could see bright lighting and hear shouting coming from nearby Aghdam, near the de facto border with Azerbaijan. "We cannot be sure what they were building, but the noise did not stop," says winemaker Aren Khachatryan, whose vineyards were located just 500 yards away from Azerbaijani military positions.

Azerbaijani soldiers have regularly fired at grape-harvesting combines. Soon there were reports that Azerbaijani soldiers had not allowed a man to leave Nagorno-Karabakh to seek medical help in Armenia, promising him a grimmer future than death without treatment: a large prison complex being constructed for men of the self-proclaimed republic. Using satellite imagery from Planet Labs, we identified a site of interest that is likely a concentration camp. South of the archaeological complex of Tigranakert, near the village of Shahbulagh, exists a large, newly constructed but unfinished building. To assess whether the complex is a prison, we applied spatial analysis methods to reveal characteristics typically associated with correctional institutions in the wider region, particularly with "medieval torture" facilities in Turkmenistan and political prisons in Turkey, as reported by Foreign Policy.

Recognizing the patterns allowed us to identify recurring elements, and the correspondence of features helped us compare these elements to known prison structures. A time series of satellite images from the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-2A showed that construction of the approximately 500,000 square-foot facility likely began in July 2022. High spatial and temporal resolution satellite images from SkySat (50 centimeters) confirmed our initial findings. The identified structure contains elements that could be related to a mass detention site for prisoners.

The satellite images indicate that construction on the complex was halted at the end of August or the beginning of September 2023," the publication wrote.