Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan is contaminated with anti-personnel mines and cluster munition remnants.

Cluster Munition Remnants

Anti-Personnel Mines
  • Performance

    Not Applicable

Key Developments

The six-week armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in September–November 2020 ended with Azerbaijan regaining control over seven districts and a large part of Nagorno-Karabakh. All parties to the conflict used cluster munitions in the course of the conflict but the extent of the resultant contamination from cluster munition remnants (CMR) in areas under Azerbaijan’s jurisdiction and control is not yet known. A massive clearance effort of areas containing mines and explosive remnants of war (ERW), including CMR, accelerated in 2022.

In 2022, the Mine Action Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan (ANAMA, formerly the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action) reported releasing just over 44km2 of cluster munition-contaminated area through clearance and technical survey (TS), with the destruction of 738 submunitions.Email from Ramil Azizov, Head of risk education, international and public relations department, ANAMA, 19 July 2023. These figures, however, are based on the total size of area for task polygons in which submunitions were found during land release as ANAMA does not currently disaggregate cluster munition tasks from other battle area clearance (BAC) tasks. In order to avoid inflating CMR clearance data, Mine Action Review has estimated that the amount of land actually containing CMR, released through clearance in 2022, was 5km2 in 2022. This compares to an estimate of clearance output for 2021 of 3km2, with the destruction of 387 submunitions.


Recommendations for Action

  • Azerbaijan should commit to never again use cluster munitions and should accede to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) as a matter of priority.
  • ANAMA, which serves as the de facto national mine action centre, should work to establish a nationwide baseline of CMR-contaminated area using evidence-based non-technical and technical survey.
  • ANAMA should ensure that survey, clearance, and contamination data related to CMR are disaggregated from data relating to other ERW and mines.
  • Azerbaijan should adopt the revised National Mine Action Standards (NMAS) without delay to allow cancellation of areas through non-technical survey (NTS), which is not permitted under the existing standards.
  • ANAMA should elaborate a separate methodology for clearing CMR specifically, distinct from BAC, ensuring that the footprint of a cluster strike is identified and clearance is conducted to fadeout.
  • ANAMA should ensure that fencing is used, and not only hazard signs, at the edge of polygons cleared of explosive ordnance where contamination continues beyond edge of the area cleared.
  • ANAMA should finalise and adopt the new draft mine action strategy to replace the strategy that expired in 2018, reflecting the significant increase in contamination now under Azerbaijan’s control.

Download the full 2023 report for Azerbaijan

Click here to download the full "Clearing Cluster Munition Remnants 2023" report for Azerbaijan.