‘Basic safety’: Trenches stretch along Karabakh front

Bayran Khalilov knew trouble was brewing when Azerbaijani government men came to dig trenches in his backyard facing the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh. The grizzled veteran of the original Karabakh conflict between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis that killed 30,000 in the 1990s knew the shells were about to start falling again. “These men came about one or two months ago and started digging,” he said in front of an L-shaped trench as wide as…