Fuzuli §

Southern gateway retaken in 2020

Fuzuli district lies south-east of the former NKAO along the approaches to the Aras valley. Armenian forces captured most of it in August 1993 during the same sequence of offensives that took Agdam, Jabrayil, Qubadli and Zangilan, displacing the Azerbaijani population. The district then remained largely empty or militarised for more than twenty-five years, with the line of contact running near its edge.

Fuzuli mattered militarily because of terrain. The flatter southern front was more suitable for Azerbaijani armour, artillery and later drone-supported operations than the northern mountains. During the 2020 war, Azerbaijan's breakthrough began in this southern belt and moved through Fuzuli and Jabrayil toward Hadrut, Zangilan and Qubadli. Broers identifies the southern advance as the operational key to Azerbaijan's victory because it outflanked Armenian defensive assumptions built around older trench lines Broers.

The district's post-2020 role is reconstruction and symbolism. Azerbaijan rapidly built Fuzuli International Airport and presented it as the "air gate" to Karabakh's reconstruction. That infrastructure serves practical purposes, but it also announces restored sovereignty to domestic and foreign audiences. editorial

The displaced Azerbaijani population's claim of return is straightforward under international law and human terms. At the same time, Fuzuli's story cannot be isolated from the post-2020 displacement of Armenians from Hadrut and later all of Nagorno-Karabakh. The atlas reads the district as part of a chain of reciprocal but unequal displacements: Azerbaijani civilians expelled in 1993, Armenian civilians expelled from adjacent areas in 2020 and 2023, with each state foregrounding only its own wounded map. contested