By Theodore Shoebat
Fifty-two Syrian fighters went to Azerbaijan to fight and kill Armenians for Turkey. They ended up never returning home as they were taken out by Armenian soldiers. As we read in a report from the Washington Post:
Families gathered around a refrigerated truck at a Syrian-Turkish border post, waiting earlier this month for the drivers to dispense their awful cargo: the bodies of 52 Syrian men, killed in a war 600 miles away.
The dead were mercenaries, recruited by Turkish-backed militias in Syria to fight on behalf of Azerbaijan against Armenia, relatives said. They were deployed as shock troops, to claw back scraps of territory in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
“They went to break the borders,” said a cousin of Mahmoud Najjar, a 38-year-old Syrian fighter whose body in the cold truck was marked with the number 12.…They flew out of southern Turkey, the cousin said. On their first day in Azerbaijan, they were given uniforms with light green shades of camouflage.The next day, they were sent to the front. “The area was heavily fortified by Armenians,” the cousin said. The Syrian mercenaries were largely on their own in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by languages, history and grievances they did not understand. They were accompanied by three Azerbaijani guides.They spent nine hours walking up a mountain, the cousin said. Najjar was sent to clear a building but was killed by a sniper’s bullet that tore off the top of his head, according to the cousin, who provided a picture of Najjar’s body to The Washington Post on the condition that it not be published. Najjar’s nephew was killed the same day.