Azernews.Az

Azerbaijan`s Defense Ministry reported that the OSCE mission will held a monitoring on troops contact line in Bala Cafarli village of Azerbaijan`s Gazakh region on December 18 in accordance with the mandate of special envoy of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office.

The monitoring will be held, on the Azerbaijani side, by field assistants of OSCE Chairman-in-Office Personal Representative Hristo Hristov and William Pryor.

From the opposite area, the monitoring will be conducted by field assistants of OSCE Chairman-in-Office Personal Representative Peter Swedberg, Evgeny Sharov and Jiri Aberle.

For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict which emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. A fragile ceasefire has been in place since 1994, but long-standing efforts by US, Russian and French mediators have been largely fruitless so far. Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council's four resolutions on its pullout from the neighboring country's territories.