KHANKENDI: SHADOWS OF SUBVERSION

In Garabagh and Eastern Zangezur, the Great Return programme is gathering pace. In one of his addresses, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev observed that the work Azerbaijan is undertaking has no parallel in the world. Reports of former internally displaced persons returning, and of schools, businesses, roads and tourist facilities opening, are coming from towns and villages that until recently were mentioned only in combat dispatches. The war is over, the chapter of conflict has been closed, and a different kind of news is finally arriving.

Nevertheless, as recent events demonstrate, it is far too soon to become complacent.

A terror attempt

On 14 September 2025, an attempted act of terrorism occurred in Khankendi, Azerbaijan. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that day a resident of the city, Karen Albertovich Hovanesian (58), retrieved a concealed Kalashnikov rifle with four magazines and five grenades from a wooded area. He then tried to approach the site of an event but was intercepted by police officers. During his detention Hovanesian resisted, throwing three hand grenades and opening fire with the rifle. He was wounded by return fire. A police officer was also injured during the operation. The Prosecutor General’s Office of Azerbaijan has opened a criminal case, and operational and investigative work is under way.

On the same day President Ilham Aliyev visited Khankendi to attend a series of events taking place in the city. Hovanesian’s attempt to carry out an attack can therefore hardly be dismissed as mere coincidence.

The investigation is ongoing, and it would be premature to draw definitive conclusions. Yet legitimate and pressing questions are already being asked by the Azerbaijani public. After the liberation of Garabagh, Baku declared that it regards the Garabagh Armenians as its citizens and is prepared to grant them all the rights enshrined in the Constitution together with the necessary security guarantees.

And yet a member of the Armenian community goes into a forest, unearths a hidden rifle and other munitions, and attempts an armed assault. How should this be interpreted? To what degree can the remaining ethnic Armenians be trusted? And how many more potential Hovanesians will need to be neutralised?

The investigation and the courts will in due course establish whether Karen Hovanesian acted alone or whether he was directed by others. On the face of it, he may not resemble a trained saboteur. But, as security specialists stress, the “lone wolf” is the most dangerous actor. Regrettably, we have seen what such an unstable individual can achieve when security fails — for example on 30 April 2009 at the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy. Moreover, Armenian special services were implicated in that mass murder. The bloody tragedy of 8 September 1984 is instructive too: four years before the major conflict, another “lone wolf,” Genrikh Vartanov, planted a home-made bomb on a Baku city bus.

An uncomfortable prequel

With the eruption of the conflict, actors far from being “lone wolves” entered the arena. In the early 1990s Armenian nationalists launched an extensive campaign of terrorist activity against Azerbaijan. Explosions rocked buses — mainly inter-district services — and passenger trains; there was even an attempt to blow up the ferry Soviet Kalmykia. In the mid-1990s Armenian special services trained militants from the Lezgin group Sadval at their facilities; those operatives were then sent to Baku to carry out sabotage in the metro. The terrorists completed their “work” — two explosions occurred in the Baku Metro. At the same time, Igor Khatkovsky, a citizen of the Russian Federation and resident of the Kaliningrad region, was recruited. He was involved in the bombing of a passenger carriage at Baku railway station and in the mining of a freight train, and was detained while attempting another attack.

When Armenia faced the prospect of being placed among states that support international terrorism, its special services were forced to curtail their bloody activities. As it turned out, not permanently. On the eve of the 44-day war the Armenian Ministry of Defence pledged to create “assault groups” that would sabotage railways and pipelines deep in Azerbaijan’s rear and “create chaos in the enemy’s rear.” Preparations for a guerrilla campaign were also made in Garabagh once it became clear that the days of the occupation junta were numbered. The notorious Ruben Vardanyan openly called for the creation of a terrorist group called “Nemesis-2” to unleash terror against Azerbaijani diplomats. As admitted in Armenian circles after the 44-day war, many militants who had come from abroad to “help Armenia” were in no hurry to return. They changed into civilian clothes, hid their weapons and began to wait — for what? A signal to begin a campaign of subversion?

The occupation authorities conceded at the time that Garabagh was saturated with weapons and that the number of armed incidents there was on the rise.

Many experts draw attention to another factor. Caches of weapons abandoned by the Armenian occupiers are still regularly discovered in Garabagh. It is one thing when munitions are found on the sites of former military bases, police stations and similar facilities. But sometimes weapon “stashes” are discovered in the basements of residential buildings, in civilian social institutions and the like. This looks like preparation for the kind of urban guerrilla warfare Ruben Vardanyan advocated following the anti-terrorist raids. True, the would-be guerrilla “heroes” mostly fled to Armenia. The oligarch-provocateur himself, by the way, did the same. But as the incident in Khankendi demonstrates, complacency would be unwise. This is particularly so against the backdrop of the principal risk factor: the cult of terror that persists within the Armenian milieu.

When terrorists are made into heroes

Although it has been emphasised repeatedly, it is worth recalling: the roots of political terror in Armenian nationalist circles stretch back to the 19th century. Dashnak militants took hostages at the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul and attempted to assassinate the vice-governor of Baku, Prince Nakashidze. From that time, terrorists began to be fashioned into national heroes. In fairness it should be noted that while terror was practised by many in the 19th century, numerous movements subsequently abandoned it. That was not the case in the Armenian community. In the 1920s the “Nemesis” group appeared. In the 1970s a whole series of terrorist organisations emerged, the most dangerous of which was ASALA. Massacres of Turkish diplomats were organised, leaving more than 40 victims. Each time, the perpetrators were elevated to the status of heroes.

Today in Yerevan one can see a monument not only to Soghomon Tehlirian, a terrorist from the 1920s. At the Yerablur military cemetery a memorial to ASALA militants stands. There is also a monument to the terrorists of “Nemesis.” Notably, some spaces on the monument where the names of the “heroes” should be engraved have been left empty — intended to symbolise that the struggle continues. In Yerevan there is a street and a metro station named after the international terrorist Monte Melkonian. The cult of Melkonian reached perhaps unprecedented heights in occupied Garabagh: his portraits were displayed in offices and even painted on building walls.

Many terrorists from the 1970s have settled in Armenia, including those who served sentences in European and American prisons. This ideological conditioning is, without doubt, bearing bitter fruit. And not only in Khankendi.

During the investigation into the attempted attack in Khankendi, dramatic news arrived from Armenia itself. Volodya Grigoryan, head of the Parakar community and an opposition activist who defeated the candidate from the ruling “Civil Contract” party in the elections on 30 March 2025, was killed in a shootout. Karen Abramyan, an operative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was also shot and killed alongside him.

It is noteworthy that the opposition is in no rush to attribute Grigoryan’s murder to the “bloody regime.” Opposition circles in Armenia are closely linked to the Garabagh clan, tainted by both its support for terror and its ties to the criminal world. It is telling that many opposition figures in Armenia say, with alarm, that it is becoming customary in the country to resolve disputes through violence.

That alarm is well founded. It is sufficient to recall how on 27 October 1999 five terrorists led by Nairi Hunanyan carried out a mass shooting in the Armenian parliament, or the hostage-taking at a police base in Yerevan in the summer of 2016. This does not include the long series of political assassinations that often accompany major internal political upheavals there. If terror becomes accepted as a legitimate method of struggle, it will be used — and first and foremost against one’s own people.