Armenians convert ‘Aghdam Jamia Mosque’ into pigsty in occupied Karabakh

Armenians have turned the Agdam Cathedral Mosque -- 19th-century Islamic monumental building -- into a pigsty in occupied Karabakh as a part of the anti-Islam campaign following the Armenian aggression on July 23, 1993, that the Armenian troops had captured large a part of Agdam region. In February 1992, an unprecedented massacre of the Azerbaijani population was perpetrated in Khojaly. As a result of the bloody tragedy that went down in history as the Khojaly genocide, thousands of Azerbaijanis were killed and disappeared, and the city itself was wiped off the face of the earth. In May 1992, the Armenians occupied Shusha and the Lachin region, located between Nagorno-Qarabagh and Armenia. In 1993, the armed forces of Armenia seized six more areas around Nagorno-Qarabagh – Kelbajar, Agdam, Fizuli, Jabrail, Gubadly and Zangelan. As a result of the Armenian aggression on July 23, 1993, a large part of the Agdam region, 89 settlements, whose population was subjected to ethnic cleansing, was captured. Six thousand inhabitants only died during of the city's defense. After the Armenians captured Agdam in 1993, the city was completely plundered and destroyed. All the cultural heritage of the Azerbaijani people was barbarously destroyed. Armenian troops destroyed all city buildings, however, the city mosque partly survived in this chaos. The Agdam Cathedral Mosque, one of the religious monumental buildings of Qarabagh of the 19th century. The mosque was built by the architect Karbalayi Safikhan Qarabakhhi from 1868 to 1870, at a time when Agdam became an important trading center of the region. The architecture of the Agdam mosque has all the characteristic features of the Qarabagh region. Despite the fact that the mosques were able to resist, the minarets of the mosque were demolished from the inside, the ceiling was broken in several places, the structures and inscriptions were broken. Moreover, the Armenians intentionally began to keep pigs in the Agdam mosque, turning religious monuments into an object for insults. The current situation of the Juma mosque confirms the violation by the Armenians of the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.