“Aghdam was destroyed during the years of occupation. It was not destroyed during the first Karabakh war. It was destroyed after for almost 30 years, stone by stone. All the buildings have been ruined and dismantled. Stones have been stolen and sold out”. President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has said in his speech at the ceremony of the Azerbaijan National Urban Forum on the “Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda as engines of post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation” in Aghdam in partnership with the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), the State Committee on Urban Planning and Architecture of Azerbaijan and with the organizational support of the ADA University.

The head of state underlined that the only half destroyed building was a building of Juma Mosque: “But the reason why it was not destroyed along with other mosques which Armenians destroyed in the former occupied territories was that they were using the minarets for observation to see potential movement of Azerbaijani armed forces. But we have video and photo evidences of desecration of Aghdam Mosque, where Armenians kept pigs and cows in the mosque. Total 65 out of 67 mosques which existed on the liberated territories were totally destroyed. Two of them, one here and one in Shusha were half destroyed and desecrated”.

“The only places where not all the buildings have been destroyed were Shusha, Lachin and partly Kalbajar. But the reason for that was that the Armenian state was conducting a policy of illegal settlement of Armenians from different countries to settle on the occupied territories and this is considered to be a brutal violation of international law and Geneva conventions”- President Ilham Aliyev added.