Azerbaijan Expelled 120,000 Armenians. Now It’s Erasing Their Churches.

Azerbaijan is an excellent example of the influence Sharia can have in a majority-Muslim state, even one that is officially secular and whose society is not notably religious. Like its friend and ally Turkey, Azerbaijan has labored to rid itself of its Christians, and to diminish the domains of its Christian neighbor, Armenia — most notably Artsakh, or Nagorno-Karabakh, a formerly Christian Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan.

Christian Post reported Tuesday that Azerbaijan now “controls” Nagorno-Karabakh, and that “the ethnic Armenian government that existed there for decades is gone. More than 120,000 Armenians were forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland following months of blockade, severe deprivation, and Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive. Azerbaijan now possesses the towns where they lived, the cemeteries where they buried their dead, and the monasteries where Armenian Christians worshiped for centuries.”

Azerbaijan is not exactly taking care to guard the historic churches and monasteries in the territory it has seized, some of which are centuries old. Instead, after the fashion of Islamic jihadis from time immemorial, it is busy erasing the traces of the fact that there were ever any Armenians who lived in Nagorno-Karabakh.

This has been going on for quite some time. In May 2024, Azeri forces destroyed St. John the Baptist Church in the town of Shusi in Artsakh, as well as the entire village of Karintak. Azeris also began construction of a large mosque in Karintak to serve the spiritual needs of the Muslim Azeris who would be moving into the homes that the Armenians had been forced to vacate.

Ironically, according to International Christian Concern, “in 2021, an Azerbaijani legislator posted to Twitter/X a photo of Christian clerics praying at the St. John the Baptist Church in Shushi, citing ‘the national cultural diversity existing in Azerbaijan’ and ‘the atmosphere of ethnic and religious tolerance.’” That was, however, just for show. In reality, Azerbaijan’s “diversity,” like that of the entire Muslim world, was decidedly monochromatic.

ICC noted that the church had been there for over a century and a half: “The church in Shushi, built by Armenians in 1847, was known in Armenian as St. Hovhannes Mkrtich or Kanach Zham (the green chapel). Azerbaijan destroyed the church and several surrounding buildings during the winter of 2023-2024 according to satellite imagery published by Caucasus Heritage Watch, an investigative institution supported by Cornell University. An image dated from April 2024 shows the rubble where the church and surrounding buildings in Shushi once stood.”

The Azeris were just getting started. International Christian Concern reported in June 2024 that “in October and November 2023, Azerbaijan damaged the archeological remains of the 1838 Meghretsots Holy Mother of God Church, the Yerevan Gate Cemetery, and the Ghazanchetsots cemetery, according to satellite imagery published by Caucasus Heritage Watch, an investigative institution supported by Cornell University.”

All this targeting of churches, said the ICC, “shows that Azerbaijan has continued its push to erase the presence of Armenian cultural and historical monuments. After the fall of Artsakh in September 2023, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention — a U.S.-based non-governmental organization (NGO) — denounced that Azerbaijan indicated it had ‘genocidal intent against Armenians and particularly against Armenians in Artsakh’ and called the continuing destruction of Armenian churches and other historical monuments in Artsakh a ‘cultural genocide’ intending ‘to erase the historical presence’ of Armenian heritage in the region.”

That effort continues. Caucasus Heritage Watch, according to Christian Post, “documented the destruction of 108 Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries between 1997 and 2011. This represented 98% of the Armenian cultural sites the project documented there. Among the losses was the medieval cemetery at Julfa, which once contained thousands of Armenian khachkars. The cemetery was systematically destroyed, and Azerbaijan later denied that it had existed while preventing independent investigators from examining the site.”

And now, “physical traces of Armenian life are disappearing in Nagorno-Karabakh. Satellite monitoring has documented the destruction of churches, cemeteries, and villages. Karintak has been almost entirely razed. In Stepanakert, Azerbaijan has demolished two Armenian churches, including the Holy Mother of God Cathedral, which was consecrated in 2019. A cemetery in Shushi containing Armenian and Russian graves, medieval khachkars, and nineteenth century gravestones was also destroyed.”

Christian Post notes that “these are not isolated incidents. They reveal a pattern that should concern every government and every person of conscience.” Indeed. For all too many in the West, however, to notice, much less decry, such a pattern would be unacceptably “Islamophobic.”