Jabrayil §

Aras valley corridor of war

Jabrayil district sits along the southern belt near the Aras River and Iran. Armenian forces captured it in August 1993, and its Azerbaijani population became part of the wider internally displaced community produced by the First Karabakh War. For the next quarter century the district was internationally recognised as Azerbaijani territory under Armenian control, a legal status reflected in the 1993 UN Security Council resolutions and the diplomacy of the OSCE Minsk Group.

The district returned to military prominence in 2020. Azerbaijan's offensive on the southern front moved through Jabrayil early in the Second Karabakh War, using drone-supported firepower and the more open terrain of the Aras valley to break Armenian lines. The fall of Jabrayil helped open the route westward toward Zangilan and northward toward Hadrut and Shusha Broers.

Jabrayil's post-war reconstruction has been folded into the Great Return programme and into Azerbaijani narratives of de-occupation. Armenian wartime usage of the district included military positions, roads and some settlement, but no state recognised those changes as lawful sovereignty. This is one of the places where the legal record is unusually clear even when moral narratives are not: the pre-1993 Azerbaijani civilian population was displaced from its own district, and return is a legitimate claim. editorial

The district also links to the heritage dispute. Armenian references to Mehakavan and nearby church sites in Jabrayil district have been monitored after 2020 by Armenian and international heritage groups, while Azerbaijan frames Armenian-era alterations as traces of occupation rather than heritage belonging. That dispute over monuments mirrors the dispute over land: control determines which past is visible, renamed, restored or removed. contested