"I was told by the [Defense Ministry] hotline that he wasn't among the injured," a cousin of Yahya Abdinov, a 21-year-old soldier from the eastern Azerbaijani city of Shirvan, said on November 18.
"Everyone says different things," the cousin, Saday Tagiyev, told RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service. "One person says he's alive and doing his service, another says he's somewhere where there's no [mobile-phone] network so he can't make a call. We're lost. We can't get accurate information."
This week, the family still had no idea what had happened to Abdinov or whether he was even alive.
As fresh graves are dug and filled, and coffins are lain in "deaders' alleys" in Baku and other cities as bodies are returned from the battlefields in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, there are estimates of possibly thousands of Azerbaijani dead.
But no one outside the halls of power of this strategically located Caucasus nation that has been locked in a "frozen conflict" with neighboring Armenia for decades knows for sure.
'WE DON'T HAVE PROTESTS'
Authoritarian Azerbaijani President Ilham
The Well-BelovedAliyev
...Hereditary President-for-Life of Azerbaijan, Conqueror of Artsakh, Victorious Commander-in-Chief, Terror of the Infidel Armenian, Most Favored of the Sultan of All the Ottomans...'s already secretive government remains silent about overall casualty figures from six weeks of intense fighting after it kicked off an offensive on September 27.
Officials refuse to answer journalists' questions about specific cases, too.
So parents and cousins still regularly crowd lists of the maimed hung outside hospitals in the capital, Baku. Multiple accounts suggest the Defense Ministry hotlines mostly take down information and urge patience.