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The Azeri Defence Ministry said the opposing forces attempted to recover lost ground by launching counter-attacks in the directions of Fizuli, Jabrayil, Agdere and Terter.

The ministry said in a statement there was fighting around Fizuli city and the Armenian army shelled the Dashkesan region on the border between the two countries, miles away from Nagorno-Karabakh on Tuesday morning.

Armenia denied those reports but reported fighting throughout the night and said that Nagorno-Karabakh’s army repelled attacks in several directions along the line of contact.

At least 29 people were killed on Monday when the two sides pounded each other with rockets and artillery in the fiercest round of the decades-old conflict in more than a quarter of a century.    “This is a life-and-death war,” Arayik Harutyunyan, the Nagorno-Karabakh leader, told a briefing.

Any move to all-out war could drag in major regional powers Russia and Turkey. Moscow has a defence alliance with Armenia, which provides vital support to the enclave and is its lifeline to the outside world, while Ankara backs its own ethnic Turkic kin in Azerbaijan.

“We haven’t seen anything like this since the ceasefire to the war in the 1990s. The fighting is taking place along all sections of the front line,” said Olesya Vartanyan, senior analyst for the South Caucasus region at Crisis Group……..

Vartanyan said the use of rockets and artillery brought a higher risk of civilian casualties that could make the escalation hard to stop by diplomatic means: “If there are mass casualties, it will be extremely difficult to contain this fighting and we will definitely see a full-fledged war that will have a potential intervention of Turkey or Russia, or both of them.”

Russia called for an immediate ceasefire, and Turkey said it would support Azerbaijan……….. https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/fierce-clashes-rage-in-azerbaijan-s-ethnic-armenian-enclave-20200929-p56051.html