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Armine Atabekyan, a woman forcibly displaced from Artsakh in the wake of the mid-September Azerbaijani attack, says she and her family reached Armenia with great difficulty.

“We narrowly escaped death,” she told Panorama.am in an interview on Friday.

The woman stresses they endured all hardships in order to continue living in their ancestral homeland, surviving Azerbaijan’s nine-month blockade and starvation.

“The enemy spared no one, including women, children and the elderly. Thanks to our soldiers, we resisted as much as we could to live on our land. We did not want to leave, but they created a situation in which it was even impossible to take anything with us from home. We somehow got here to be saved," says Mrs. Armine.

Azeri troops were already on the outskirts of Martuni when the residents left their hometown. They had a hard time getting to Armenia. “There was no fuel, thanks to our administration we managed to find some and reached the area. As soon as we crossed the Hakari bridge [into Armenia], we all felt as though we had been reborn and regained hope,” she recalls.

Now Armine's family has rented an apartment in the city of Vanadzor. They have only received 100,000 drams from the government in assistance.