The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is an ethnic and territorial dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the region bearing that name. The current conflict began in 1988 and escalated into a full-scale war in the early 1990s. Later, it turned into a low-intensity conflict with successive escalations, primarily in 2016 and 2020.
In 2005, Azerbaijan’s State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons recorded 4,740 missing persons. During the conflict’s escalation in 2020, another 5,000 soldiers were killed, and many of them remain unidentified.
At the request of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), EAAF led two seminars, in October 2021 and January 2022, to raise awareness among military personnel, military and civilian prosecutors, and local forensic physicians. It also provided consulting on a needs assessment for improving local capabilities, as part of the strategy for improving a sustainable state mechanism in the country to search for and identify people in this conflict with Armenia.
