Alexander Nevsky Russian Orthodox Church that, according to Argam Ayvazyan, was built in 1862 by the Araskhanians, a prominent Armenian clan from Agulis. Likely due to three factors - its noticeable position on an international border, reputation as the world’s largest collection of khachkars, and previously voiced Armenian concerns for its preservation - Djulfa was the last major Armenian site in Nakhichevan to be destroyed. In his own words, he was personally appointed to this position by Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of political Islam in Turkey and formerly a mentor to current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He reportedly witnessed the destruction of Agulis’s churches and quit his position as Member of Azerbaijan’s Parliament in protest of the late 2005 demolition of Djulfa. Unlike the self-publicized cultural destruction of ISIS, independent Azerbaijan’s covert campaign to re-engineer Nakhichevan’s historical landscape between 1997 and 2006 is little known outside the region. Other Armenian scholars perceive Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian destruction as part of a larger agenda of realizing a vision of pan-Turkism: an ethnically homogenous Turkic polity comprising Turkey, Azerbaijan, and their ethnolinguistic brethren across Eurasia. In April 2011, when a US Ambassador traveled to Azerbaijan, on the southwestern edge of the former USSR, he was denied access to the riverside borderland that separates this South Caucasus nation from Iran. The Australian Catholic University’s former Julfa Cemetery Digital Repatriation Project, the brainchild of Judith Crispin, escort diyarbakır aimed to virtually recreate Djulfa with 3D imaging technologies. Photographs from 2006 taken from the Iranian side of the border showed that a military rifle range had been erected where the cemetery used to be, presumably by Azerbaijan’s armed forces, to rationalize the existence of the freshly flattened soil

According to witnesses, as quoted in Armenian reports, in a three-day operation last December, Azerbaijani soldiers armed with sledgehammers obliterated the remnants of the Djulfa cemetery (known as Jugha in Armenian). He works closely with the Turkish Embassy in Baku. He set up the Union of Muslim Students (Müslüman Talebeler Birliği) and had served as the Caucasus representative of Turkish political Islam grassroots organization Milli Görüş (National View). While some Azerbaijanis have embraced their government’s vandalism as either righteous revenge or a national security measure against potential Armenian territorial claims, other Azerbaijanis - in addition to the humanist author Akram Aylisli - have mourned the destruction. But a newly released book reveals that Aylisli first protested the destruction in Nakhichevan nearly a decade earlier. The ambassador had intended to probe the reported destruction of thousands of historical Medieval Christian Armenian artworks and objects at the necropolis of Djulfa in Nakhichevan. Despite ample testimony to the contrary, Azerbaijan claims that Nakhichevan was never Armenian. However, for 11 days, Azerbaijan did not allow the problem to be assessed and repaired. Büyükfırat kept the phone conversation cryptic and said he was involved in "major stuff that is important." Mullah Muhammed prayed for him and added that "Allah will clear your path." During police questioning, Mullah Muhammed denied knowing Büyükfırat, although Büyükfırat admitted he knew him well and described him as a close family cleric

An EP spokesman told The Art Newspaper that when the party tried to enter Nakhichevan, it was "opposed by the Azerbaijan authorities". For example, when it came to surveying the interior of Nakhichevan’s preeminent cathedral in the town of Agulis in September 1972, he asked an elderly local matriarch, Marus, to escort him to a potentially hostile encounter. From September 27 to November 9, 2020, Azerbaijan-with the support of its closest ally, Turkey-committed many atrocities and bombed towns and villages across Artsakh, including homes and maternity hospitals. Moreover, following his 2009 retirement, UNESCO director-general Kōichirō Matsuura joined Azerbaijan’s state-managed "Baku International Multiculturalism Centre" as a trustee, while his successor Irina Bokova frequented Baku for President Aliyev’s "World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue." Allegations of foul play lack hard evidence, however, perhaps except for The Guardian’s September 4, 2017 report "UK at centre of secret $3bn Azerbaijani money laundering and lobbying scheme." This investigative article by Luke Harding, Caelainn Barr, and Dina Nagapetyants cited questionable payments to Bokova’s husband. Their 2010 geospatial study concluded that "satellite evidence is consistent with reports by observers on the ground who have reported the destruction of Armenian artifacts in the Djulfa cemetery." In November 2013, dressed in the guise of a pilgrim to a Djulfa chapel now preserved on the Iranian side of the border, one of the authors of this article saw desolate grasslands across the river in Azerbaijan. As the last Armenian resident of a nearby village, she knew how to speak softly with the Azerbaijani community of Agulis. The Azerbaijani army began clearing the Jugha cemetery in 1998, removing 800 of the khachkars before complaints by Unesco brought a temporary halt. In the meantime, Yakup Ergun, the police intelligence officer who drafted reports about the jihadist activities of Büyükfırat as part of the counterterrorism investigation, was removed from his job by the Erdoğan government and later fired