Turkey sees Upper Karabakh 'as own' issue, Erdoğan says

Turkey hopes the Upper Karabakh issue between Azerbaijan and Armenia will be resolved urgently within the scope of UN resolutions, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday.

During a joint news conference with Azerbaijan's freshly-reelected President Ilham Aliyev in capital Ankara, Erdoğan said Turkey had seen the Upper Karabakh issue as its own "from the beginning".

"Since the beginning, we saw the Upper Karabakh issue as our own," he said.

"Our biggest desire about the issue is that it will be resolved urgently within the scope of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity, inviolability of its borders, and within the scope of UN resolutions."

The Khojaly Massacre is seen as one of the bloodiest and most controversial incidents of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan for control of the now-occupied Upper Karabakh region.

On Feb. 26, 1992, on the heels of the Soviet Union's dissolution, Armenian forces took over the town of Khojaly in Karabakh after battering it with heavy artillery and tanks, assisted by an infantry regiment.

The two-hour offensive killed 613 Azerbaijani citizens, including 116 women and 63 children, and critically injured 487 others, according to Azerbaijani figures. Also, 150 of the 1,275 Azerbaijanis that the Armenians captured during the massacre remain missing.