BBC.com: Azeris around the world have been remembering the 20th anniversary of the bloodiest episode in their country’s recent history, when Azerbaijan says more than 600 civilians, including women and children, were killed.
It was one of many violent incidents in Azerbaijan’s brutal war with Armenia, which erupted in the 1990s amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It was a freezing, snowy night when Armenian troops marched into Ramila’s home town of Khojaly. She fled with her family into a nearby forest.
It was there that her husband was shot dead. She survived only because she was carrying her two-year-old son on her back. As she ran, he was shot instead of her.
Her daughter with whom she was pregnant at the time is the only child she has left. Those events still haunt Ramila today.
“I can’t forget,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “It’s like it happened yesterday. I re-live it every single day.”
Azerbaijan’s government says that in one night alone, on 26 February 1992, 613 Azeri civilians died, including 169 women and children.
According to Azerbaijan, they were either shot dead by Armenian soldiers or froze to death as they tried to flee Khojaly.
BBC.com