Religious Leaders Call For Sniper Withdrawal In Nagorno-Karabakh

30/11/2011 YEREVAN — The leading religious leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia have called for a withdrawal of snipers from the front lines in the disputed breakaway Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh to stop bloodshed amid more reported casualties in the conflict zone, RFE/RL’s Armenian Service reports. Russian Patriarch Kiril read out a statement that he made jointly with Catholicos Karekin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church; and Azerbaijan’s top Shi’a Muslim leader, Sheikh ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazade, at the end of a meeting in Yerevan on November 21 held as part of a summit of top clerics from post-Soviet countries. Armenian and international mediators have repeatedly called for a bilateral withdrawal of snipers to reduce deadly cease-fire violations reported along the Armenian-Azerbaijani “line of contact” in Karabakh on a regular basis and blamed by both sides on each other.