CSTO Secretary General: Any mercenaries, Syrian merceries must leave  the Karabakh conflict zone

ArmInfo. The CSTO had  information, even a general one, about the presence, presence and  action of militants from Syria in the zone of the Nagorno-Karabakh  conflict. On February 2, during a briefing, CSTO Secretary General  Stanislav Zas said this, answering the question of where the  mercenaries from the Karabakh conflict zone have gone and whether  they now pose a threat to the countries of the Organization.

According to him, the Organization regards this as certain risks for  the CSTO member states, for the bloc.  "Where are these militants  now, are they where they have gone - it is difficult for me to answer  because the control of the situation in this territory is now carried  out by the forces that are involved in this process - the  peacekeeping forces, Azerbaijan and Armenia. We proceed from the fact  that any mercenaries, Syrian militants must leave this territory.  Stop their activities because the creation of some kind of militant  detachments or groups, illegal armed formations in the immediate  vicinity of the borders of the CSTO member countries create certain  risks for our collective security, "the CSTO Secretary General summed  up ...  It should be noted that after Azerbaijan's large-scale  military aggression against Artsakh, unleashed in September last  year, a number of media outlets wrote about hundreds of Syrian  militants associated with Turkey deployed to Karabakh and about the  readiness to send "hundreds more" mercenaries to the Karabakh  conflict zone.

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad stated that militants from Syria are  being transferred to Karabakh, and Turkey is using terrorists from  Syria and other countries in Nagorno-Karabakh. In turn, the director  of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, also  reported that, according to the information available to the SVR,  mercenaries from international terrorist organizations fighting in  the Middle East are actively pulling into the conflict zone, and we  are talking about hundreds and even thousands of radicals.  At the  time, French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke about the transfer  of 300 Syrian militants across Turkey to Baku in early October. The  leaders of Azerbaijan and Turkey, despite providing numerous factual  evidence of their involvement in the hostilities, denied their  involvement.

And the Russian Foreign Minister noted that the number of militants  participating in the conflict is in the thousands.