YEREVAN, Armenia—Beneath overcast skies on a desolate hillside, mourners passed each other shovels and took turns heaping earth onto the coffin of the dead soldier.
Leaving behind a wife and daughter, Avetis Avetisyan was 34 when he was killed by an artillery strike in the recent six-week war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Here in the Yerablur Military Memorial Cemetery late this past November, empty pits lay alongside his grave, awaiting more fallen from the battlefield. Atop the hill were older, more elaborate gravestones, etched with the faces of soldiers killed during the first Nagorno-Karabakh war of the 1990s. Now, a whole new hillside of graves stretched out.
