Thousands in Armenia fleeing N-Karabakh fighting

As heavy fighting continues in Nagorno-Karabakh, thousands of people are fleeing to a part of southern Armenia to escape the conflict in the separatist region.

Footage from British broadcaster Sky News showed ethnic Armenians arriving into the Goris area on Sunday carrying all the possessions they could after leaving their men on the front lines.

Roxanna Khacatryan was one of those who fled, leaving her 20-year-old son to fight.

"He always tried to give me hope that everything will be alright," she says choking back the tears.

"I don't really know how he is doing. I just need a peaceful life, only peace and nothing else," she adds.

According to Sky News, many of the war wounded are being taken to Goris for treatment because the hospitals in Nagorno-Karabakh are full.

Residents of Goris are no strangers to conflict, many remember the last round of fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s.

"I'm not afraid at all. Previously I was in the war in the 90s and now I'm nor afraid to go to war again," says Vrej Dalakyan, standing close to the walls of the church in Goris which is still peppered with bullet holes from the last time the two sides took up arms.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked for decades in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, where a separatist war was fought in the early 1990s until three years after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The region in the Caucasus Mountains of about 4,400 square kilometers (1,700 square miles), roughly the size of the US state of Delaware, is 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Armenian border.

It has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces and the Armenian military since the 1994 end of a full-scale separatist war that killed about 30,000 people and displaced an estimated 1 million.