[Al Ahram] Arch-foes Armenia and Azerbaijan traded accusations of launching a military offensive using artillery fire along their shared border on Sunday, with Baku reporting two troops killed.Azerbaijan's defence ministry said Armenia's "offensive" from its northern Tavush region was met with a "counterstrike" and retreated."Two Azerbaijani servicemen were killed and five more maimed," it added.
Yerevan, on its part, accused Baku of "using artillery in an attack aimed at capturing (Armenian) positions."
"They were repulsed, suffering losses in manpower. There were no casualties among Armenian servicemen," Armenia's defence ministry spokeswoman, Shushan Stepanyan, said in a Facebook post.
Fighting resumed late in the night with Azerbaijani forces shelling Armenian positions from trench mortars and tanks, according to Stepanyan.
"Azerbaijan's political and military leadership will bear the responsibility for the consequences of the escalation," she said.
The two former Soviet republics have for decades been locked in a simmering conflict over Nagorny Karabakh, a breakaway territory which was at the heart of a bloody war in the 1990s.
But the Sunday festivities were far from Karabakh, and directly between the two Caucasus states, which happens rarely.
Since a fragile 1994 ceasefire, peace talks between Baku and Yerevan have been mediated by the "Minsk Group" of diplomats from La Belle France, Russia, and the United States.
- SPECTRE OF WAR -
Sunday's festivities erupted days after Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev raised the spectre of a fresh war with Armenia and denounced stalled peace talks.
On Tuesday, Aliyev threatened to withdraw from Karabakh negotiations "if they yield no results." He did not provide details.
Citing the right to self-defence enshrined in the United Nations
...boodling on the grand scale...
Charter, he rejected the negotiators' premise that "there is no military solution to the conflict".
An all-out war between the two countries could potentially envelop the entire Caucasus, dragging in regional powers -- Armenia's military ally Russia and Azerbaijan's patron
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...-- which compete for geopolitical influence in the strategic region.
Commenting on the festivities on Sunday, Aliyev said "Armenia's military adventure is aimed at dragging into the conflict the military-political organization of which it is a member."