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China deploys 103 fighter jets toward Taiwan
By Darryl Coote
Sept. 18 (UPI) -- More than 100 Chinese fighter jets and a handful of warships were detected near Taiwan in the past 24 hours, its military said Monday, representing a steep escalation in the number of sorties Beijing has sent to the self-governing island.
Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense said in a statement that the 103 fighter jets and nine ships were detected around its island within the 24 hours ending 6 a.m. Monday.
Forty of the aircraft had either crossed the median line that stands as a de facto border between China and Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait or its air defense identification zone, it said.
Beijing lays claim to Taiwan despite the island having never been part of the People Republic of China, which was founded in 1949.
China has vowed to take Taiwan by force, which has raised tensions in the region and with Taipei's democratic allies, especially the United States.
As it views the island as a wayward province, it conducts so-called gray zone warfare where it deploys war vessels and jets into the island's ADIZ in an effort to sap Taipei's resources and the moral of its military.
Taiwan's Ministry of Defense said the 103 sorties deployed by China represent "a recent high and has posed severe challenges to Taiwan Strait and national security."
"The communist army's continued military harassment can easily lead to a sharp increase in tension and worsen regional security," it said in a statement. "We call on the Beijing authorities to take responsibility and immediately stop such destructive unilateral actions."
Genocide Alert: Azerbaijan is attacking Nagorno Karabakh
SEP 19, 2023 12:00 PM BY CHRISTIAN SOLIDARITY INTERNATIONAL
Today, the dictatorship of Azerbaijan launched a full-scale military attack on Nagorno Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, where 120,000 Armenian Christians have been under siege for nine months.
The president of Christian Solidarity International (CSI), Dr. John Eibner, warns, “If Azerbaijan’s allies and commercial partners – the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, European Union, Israel, and Switzerland – do not act immediately to restrain it, there will be mass killings and other atrocities against the region’s civilian population. Genocide is imminent.”
CSI has received word from the minister of health for the Republic of Artsakh, Vardan Tadevosyan, that the capital city of Stepanakert is being bombed continuously by artillery. “We are under attack,” he says.
Azerbaijan’s defense ministry has announced that it has begun a military operation to “neutralize [the] military infrastructure” of the Armenians and “restore the constitutional order of the Republic of Azerbaijan.” An armed Azerbaijani conquest of Nagorno Karabakh will entail nothing less than the destruction of its ancient Armenian population.
This is the goal and has always been the goal since the Ottoman Empire.
On September 7, Elchin Amirbayov, a senior spokesman for Azerbaijan’s president, menacingly predicted “a genocide may happen” if Nagorno Karabakh’s elected leaders fail to submit.
A CSI team was in Armenia from September 11 to 16, and was able to observe Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno Karabakh to the outside world. The CSI team also observed Azerbaijani military outposts built many kilometers inside the Republic of Armenia itself. It is highly likely that this war will spread to southern Armenia and beyond.
CSI’s Joel Veldkamp, who was part of the visiting delegation, stated, “For nine months, the major powers – Russia, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom – have done nothing to end this siege, or avert this very predictable outcome.”
A week after Azerbaijan’s siege of Nagorno Karabakh began, on December 19, 2022, CSI and nine other human rights groups issued a Genocide Warning for the Armenian Christians of the region. “Despite this early and clear warning, the world failed to respond,” Veldkamp stated.
On September 14, Yuri Kim, the U.S. State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, stated in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that “the U.S. will not countenance any action or effort—short-term or long-term—to ethnically cleanse or commit other atrocities against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
Azerbaijan is now doing just that.
Eibner states, “The United States and other members of the UN Security Council must now do collectively and individually what they should have done nine months ago – immediately use every lever at their disposal to restrain Azerbaijan and protect Nagorno Karabakh’s Armenians, including sanctioning the Azerbaijani perpetrators.”
“If not, they will be complicit in another Armenian Genocide.”
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