Volunteers give water and food to refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh region arriving in the border village of Kornidzor, Armenia, September 29, 2023. REUTERS/Irakli Gedenidze
KORNIDZOR, Armenia (Reuters) - More than three quarters of the 120,000-strong population of the ethnic Armenian breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh had fled by Friday afternoon after defeat by Azerbaijan, a faster-than-expected mass exodus that looked likely to be total.
Cars, buses and tractors carrying refugees crowded the highways on the fifth day of the exodus, which brought a sudden and decisive end to one of the most intractable of the decades-old ethnic "frozen conflicts" of the former Soviet Union.
