Armenia reports casualties amid border tension with Azerbaijan

Armenian troops thwarted an Azeri incursion into the northeastern province of Tavush bordered by Azerbaijan on Thursday morning, Armenian Defense Ministry spokesperson Artsrun Harutyunyan posted on his Facebook account.

The Armenian forces suffered three losses while fending off the Azeri attack, said the spokesperson. According to the same source, the Azeri troops had "up to seven" deaths, with the body of one of them still lying on the Armenian side of the border.

This has been the first escalation of such a scale between the two conflicting countries since high tensions in April broke out into a four-day skirmishes with scores of casualties on both sides.

What makes Thursday's incident even more unusual is that the clashes occurred on internationally recognized Armenia's territory rather than the contact line in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian populated breakaway region of Azerbaijan where skirmishes often took place.

Armenia is a member of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization and it remains to be seen how the security bloc of former Soviet republics, many of whom are in friendly relations with Azerbaijan, will react to the incident. Endi