“Turk of America” magazine of the US-based Turkish diaspora has issued an article titled “A terrible tragedy happened 22 years ago in Khojaly, Azerbaijan” by editor-in-chief of “Khalq” (People) newspaper Hasan Hasanov and employer of the newspaper Rauf Aliyev.

The article reads: “On February 26, 1992, a terrible tragedy happened in Khojaly before the very eyes of the world community, which is shouting loudly about human rights and freedoms. Helped by the 366th armored and infantry regiment, whose command and personnel were mostly Armenians, and which was located in the town of Khankendi, the Armenian armed forces brutally massacred unarmed and defenseless Khojaly Azerbaijanis, including children, women and the elderly, and tortured those who survived. The world community has not or did not want to hear the screams of the women who were tortured, the children who were disemboweled and the elders who were beaten on the night of February 25-26. The Khojaly residents who survived say that four Meskheti Turks and three Azerbaijanis were beheaded near an Armenian grave. Two Azerbaijanis later had their eyes pulled out. People were skinned and had their eyes pulled out alive, while captives suffered gruesome tortures. And the only “guilt” of the people who were subjected to genocide and suffered torture was their being Azerbaijanis. It is the very reason why the Armenians killed and tortured people. However, it`s hard to understand why the world remained silent when this unprecedented genocide happened.

In just one night, the Armenian armed forces wiped the town of Khojaly off the face of the earth. The massacre claimed lives of 613 civilians, including 106 women, 63 children, and 70 elders. Some 1,275 civilians were captured, with 150 of them still missing. Eight families were completely annihilated, 25 children lost both and 130 children lost one parent. Some 76 of a total of 487 wounded people were children.

And it is not only we that speak of the brutality of the Khojaly genocide. Foreign journalists who witnessed the tragic events call the Khojaly genocide one of the biggest tragedies of humanity. In their articles, they highlight unprecedented scenes of violence in the town.

Fore example, Jean-Yves Junet, a journalist from France, the country which still patronizes the Armenians, writes: “...We happened to be the witnesses of Khojaly massacre, we saw the dead — bodies of hundreds of civilians — women, children, old people and defenders of Khojaly. We managed to fly by a helicopter, we were taking photographs of everything we saw around Khojaly at a height of a bird's flight. That was a terrible scene. I heard a lot about wars, about cruelty of the fascists, but Armenians went beyond them, killing 5 or 6 year-old children, innocent people. We saw a lot of injured people in hospitals, carriages, even in kindergartens and schools.”

Rory Peck of Frontline News, a British TV channel, says: “It`s hard to convey to the world community the scale of the tragedy in Khojaly. It took us a lot of trouble to get by helicopter to the village of Nakhchivanik, where the Armenians settled. Here we saw tens of badly mutilated bodies. These were not the bodies of the fighters who were defending Khojaly, these were the bodies of civilians of the Azerbaijani town – the children, women and the elderly shot down by the murderers. We suppose they were murdered while running to Aghdam, another Azerbaijani town, in an attempt to survive the Armenian bullets.”

The Armenians themselves admit the tragedy that happened in Khojaly. One of them is journalist Daud Kheyrian, who witnessed the brutality of the Armenians and then escaped to Beirut. In his For the Sake of Cross book, he says: “…The Armenian group “Gaflan” (dealing with the burning of dead bodies) collected 100 corpses of Azerbaijanis and burned them in a place located one kilometer from Khojaly to the West on March 2… I saw a girl aged 10 in one of the trucks. She was wounded in hands and head. But she was still alive despite hunger, coldness and wounds. She could hardly breathe. Her eyes were full of fear. A soldier named Tigranian threw her on other corpse. Then they burnt other dead bodies. I heard a scream coming from one of dead bodies being burnt. I could nothing to do. I returned to Shusha. They continued a terrible atrocity against Azerbaijanis.”