Armenian couple in Talish shot to death by Azerbaijani forces (Source: Hetq)
BY LOIS TOCHROP and BILL BARTON
In early April, while Nevada State Assembly Speaker John Hambrick was in Azerbaijan hobnobbing with its dictator Ilham Aliyev, his host was committing ISIS-like war crimes.
On April 1, Aliyev’s forces attacked the Armenian-populated Artsakh, also known as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, in part because legislators like Speaker Hambrick have encouraged belligerent behavior by passing absurd resolutions in praise of Aliyev’s oil-rich dictatorship.
One heartbreaking account of Azerbaijan’s barbaric actions during the four-day war in April was the mutilated elders that journalists found in Talish after its recapture from Azeri forces. The bodies of husband and wife Valera and Razmela Khalapyan with chopped-off ears were found inside their home. Photographs released by Azeri soldiers on social media showed beheaded Armenian soldiers, including 20-year-old Yezidi Kurd Kyaram Sloyan. Among the Azerbaijani officers Aliyev honored at a ceremony following the four-day war was the man who had posed with Sloyan’s severed head.
One irony of Aliyev’s war crimes is the official praise of “toleranceâ€
