Azerbaijan is racing to rebuild in recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh

Arif Hajiyev has spent his career working for the municipality of Agdam, his home town in Azerbaijan. For three decades, however, he was unable to set foot there. In the early 1990s, Agdam fell victim to the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, a multi-ethnic region claimed by both Azerbaijan and Armenia. Its Azeri population fled, and the town was looted and landmined. But in November 2020, Azerbaijan won back much of the territory, including Agdam. Now, Mr Hajiyev says, a new era has arrived. “I am more than excited to be moving back,” he says, gazing at the ruins of his former high school.

Agdam is the centrepiece of Azerbaijan’s reconstruction of Nagorno-Karabakh: a huge project to rebuild towns and villages and resettle some 700,000 Azeris who fled the region during a war with Armenia in the early 1990s. An area covering 4,400 square km was largely abandoned and militarised, and by the time Azerbaijan took back control there was barely a house left standing. (In September 2023, 120,000 ethnic Armenians fled a second Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh; their homes are now abandoned as their Azeri neighbours’ once were.)