Davit Sargsyan was a reservist tank soldier within the Armenian military when he volunteered to struggle within the 2020 Artsakh struggle.
His recollections of the final days of the paint an image of disorganization and incompetence within the ranks of Armenian troopers and officers defending Shushi, the famed Armenian fortress city, from advancing Azerbaijani army items.
After receiving twenty days of coaching, an 84-member fight battalion was mobilized and dispatched to Shushi on October 27. Sargsyan was a member of the battalion.
Sargsyan sat down with Hetq to share what he witnessed on the bottom previous to the November 9 ceasefire.
He says the battalion by no means acquired any orders from the army brass and Artsakh President Arayik Harutyunyan was pressured to step in and inform them what to do.
He says a lot of the battalion, sixty volunteers, refused to imagine protection positions round Shushi and stayed in a neighborhood faculty
Azerbaijani advance items had been reported in Shushi by November 5.
That evening, after assessing the scenario, the battalion and the native Shushi militia retreated to Stepanakert.
On November 7, the remaining group of sixty in Shushi additionally manages to get escape the Azerbaijani blockade.
Sargsyan says that so far he nonetheless doesn’t know who was chargeable for organizing and operating the protection of Shushi.
He says that the Armenian army command construction began to collapse on October 27.
“There was no info on the placement of the enemy, no plan of motion or defensive techniques,” Sargsyan instructed Hetq.
He says there have been Armenian forces stationed in all components of Shushi, consisting of particular items, items cobbled collectively from different forces, mobilized reservists and native militias.
“There have been ample human sources to defend town. However I can’t discuss in regards to the quantity of army tools. I do know the air protection unit of Shushi was working,” Sargsyan mentioned.
These Armenian items, nevertheless, had been left within the lurch. They’d no particular orders and had been unaware of one another’s presence.
It was such a scenario that the Armenian forces did not even know one another, they did not know who was sitting the place, what they need to do.
On October 31, Sargsyan and different battalion members had been despatched to the Armenian village of Karin Tak, on the outskirts of Shushi, for a particular operation. He says the protection of the village was as disorganized as that in Shushi.
Sargsyan says that confusion reigned in Shushi throughout the previous few days earlier than the ceasefire.
“Once more, there was no metropolis protection plan. We determined to discover town and the positions by ourselves,” he says.
On the evening of November 3, at 4 am, the Azerbaijani army focused Shushi with an intense spherical of shelling. Armenian forces defending the city had been immobilized.
“I had the impression that our artillery wasn’t working,” Sargsyan says.
Artsakh President Arayik Harutyunyan visited the mobilized volunteers on November 4, promising to supply needed army tools and to right gaps within the command construction.
“We had been instructed {that a} breakthrough can be made the subsequent day. We later learnt that Karin Tak had been captured,” Sargsyan says, including that he and his comrades requested themselves in the event that they couldn’t belief Harutyunyan, what had been they doing there.
Sargsyan and his unit had been instructed to occupy the positions within the south-eastern and jap a part of Shushi in order that Azerbaijani forces couldn’t acquire entry from the Hounot gorge.
Sargsyan paints a disturbing image of what he noticed these previous couple of days.
Any semblance of an organized protection was absent. Armenian defenders of Shushi had no reference to the army command.
“I did not see any military formations, not to mention an motion. One or two mortar rounds at most,” says Sargsyan who was a part of the Berd-2 (Fort-2) protection unit.
Working low on ammunition and with none trench cowl, Sargsyan’s unit joins up with defenders from the close by Berd-2 unit.
“Seeing that town was being bombarded each by our and the enemy’s forces, and that there was no contact with anybody, we determined to retreat to the Shushi-Stepanakert Highway, dividing into two teams.”
The November 9 ceasefire got here as a shock to Sargsyan and his comrades who had left for the village of Shosh to get their army orders. No plan to defend Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh, had been drafted.
“It was organized dysfunction. An imitation of struggle, which, because of the brave feats of our boys, was extended for 44 days.”
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