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"Who knew," Ayvazyan tells Hyperallergic, "that the man who told me not to photograph churches would 30 years later launch their annihilation." Ayvazyan became increasingly cautious. The European Union is "concerned" over the latest ceasefire violations and the disruption of natural gas supply, Toivo Klaar, the EU’s special representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Armenian Service. Ethical or not, the UNESCO-Azerbaijan rapport has undoubtedly contributed to international silence over the destruction of Nakhichevan’s Armenian past

• On March 7, Azerbaijani forces opened fire on Armenian soldiers in several spots along the buffer zones, which resulted in the death of at least one Armenian soldier. For instance, two Azeri air raids severely damaged the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi, also known as the Holy Savior Cathedral, on October 8. According to official data, shelling, rockets, and airstrikes by the Azerbaijani armed forces damaged at least 71 schools and 14 kindergartens in Artsakh. The Azerbaijani army began clearing the Jugha cemetery in 1998, removing 800 of the khachkars before complaints by Unesco brought a temporary halt. Daniels, who has testified before the US Congress about issues of cultural destruction, notes that expert conservation efforts must begin with at least some material remains, however small. "The ultimate hope for in-situ reconstruction is reconciliation," explains Brian Daniels, the University of Pennsylvania’s Cultural Heritage Center director

Alexander Nevsky Russian Orthodox Church that, according to Argam Ayvazyan, was built in 1862 by the Araskhanians, a prominent Armenian clan from Agulis. Likely due to three factors - its noticeable position on an international border, reputation as the world’s largest collection of khachkars, and previously voiced Armenian concerns for its preservation - Djulfa was the last major Armenian site in Nakhichevan to be destroyed. In his own words, he was personally appointed to this position by Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of political Islam in Turkey and formerly a mentor to current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He reportedly witnessed the destruction of Agulis’s churches and quit his position as Member of Azerbaijan’s Parliament in protest of the late 2005 demolition of Djulfa. Unlike the self-publicized cultural destruction of ISIS, independent Azerbaijan’s covert campaign to re-engineer Nakhichevan’s historical landscape between 1997 and 2006 is little known outside the region. Other Armenian scholars perceive Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian destruction as part of a larger agenda of realizing a vision of pan-Turkism: an ethnically homogenous Turkic polity comprising Turkey, Azerbaijan, and their ethnolinguistic brethren across Eurasia. In April 2011, when a US Ambassador traveled to Azerbaijan, on the southwestern edge of the former USSR, he was denied access to the riverside borderland that separates this South Caucasus nation from Iran. The Australian Catholic University’s former Julfa Cemetery Digital Repatriation Project, the brainchild of Judith Crispin, eskort diyarbakır aimed to virtually recreate Djulfa with 3D imaging technologies. Photographs from 2006 taken from the Iranian side of the border showed that a military rifle range had been erected where the cemetery used to be, presumably by Azerbaijan’s armed forces, to rationalize the existence of the freshly flattened soil

I bring to your attention my deepest concern regarding the fact that such senseless action will be perceived by the world community as manifestation of disrespect for religious and moral values, and I express my hope that urgent measures will be undertaken on your part for ending this evil vandalism. But one man, Armenia-based researcher Argam Ayvazyan, anticipated the systematic destruction decades before. His photographic missions were self-financed, undercover, dangerous, and supported by his closest companion: "My wife, a teacher, was my number one pillar," recalls Ayvazyan, "she never once complained about my prolonged absences, financial hardships, or being our children’s primary caretaker." By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Ayvazyan had documented 89 Armenian churches, 5,840 ornate khachkars, and 22,000 horizontal tombstones, among other Armenian monuments. But the destruction commenced again in November 2002, and by the time the incident was written up by Icomos in its World Report on Monuments and Sites in Danger for that year, the 1500-year-old cemetery was described as "completely flattened". In the meantime, Yakup Ergun, the police intelligence officer who drafted reports about the jihadist activities of Büyükfırat as part of the counterterrorism investigation, was removed from his job by the Erdoğan government and later fired. The Erdoğan government helped save the IHH from legal troubles in Turkey while mobilizing resources and diplomatic clout to back the IHH in global operations. President Aliyev has harsh critics among Azerbaijani intellectuals and the global human rights community, but he also has passionate supporters abroad. His brother Reşit Büyükfırat, deputy chairman of the provincial health commission in Şanlıurfa, was detained