On 12 July 2020, Armenia’s military shelled the village of Aghdam in Azerbaijan’s Tovuz district in the northwest of the country. The forces of Azerbaijan responded, attacking Armenian military structures, and by 14 July both sides stood down most of their forces. Azerbaijan reported 16 dead and four wounded; the Armenians claimed five dead and 36 wounded. What made this outbreak of violence in Tovuz different, the most serious since the Four Day War in 2016, was that it was distant – over 300 kilometers – from the longstanding arena of conflict along the Nagorno-Karabakh line of contact . Azerbaijan’s Tovuz district hosts much of the country’s critical infrastructure, such as oil and natural gas pipelines that supply Europe, the Transit Europe-Asia terrestrial (fiber optic) cable, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway that connects Azerbaijan to Turkey, the M2 motorway that connects Azerbaijan and Georgia, and the Lapis Lazuli corridor , a […]