On the morning of Sept. 13, I threw my phone to the farthest corner of the room, trying to regulate my breathing. I was exhausted, mentally and physically, because I had been up all night, but I kept forcing myself to stay awake so I would not miss my class. Those few minutes of empty silence felt like an eternity of idleness, before my eyes started to look for my phone again. On a subconscious level, I knew panic was a privilege that I could not afford when my home was under attack.

The Azerbaijani military invasion on Armenian sovereign territory on September 13, 2022 targeted Armenian military bases and civilian towns across the Eastern and Southern borders, and my home town was among those under attack. The roots of ethnic and territorial conflict between the two nations goes back to the 1990s, when both sides fought for an Armenian populated region called Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) which was internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. The recent conflict was the largest after the second Nagorno-Karabakh war that took place in Sept. 2020, where around 5,000 soldiers died in around six weeks of fighting.

Onn the morning of the Sept. 13 invasion, I had received an urgent message from home to keep calm. My mom sent me a picture of my 12-year-old sister’s drawing on WhatsApp with a note: “Rosalie is happy the school is canceled.” My eyes closed, I sat on the floor sobbing and repeating the only prayer that I knew. I hated my inaction, my state of helplessness and my tears. I felt guilty for being safe when my family and thousands of others had to see the sunrise in their basements and my grade school classmates had to die for the peace that we dreamt about for decades.

In Armenia, people usually refer to the wars as never-healing wounds. The scars of the 2020 war were still open, where more than 4,000 soldiers died from the Armenian side, 11,000 got seriously injured and a significant portion of my historical homeland called Artsakh was captured. Growing up, I heard the devastating stories of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and 1992-94 first Nagorno-Karabakh War. My great grandfather was the only child in his family who survived the 1915 Genocide committed by Ottoman Turks, while my father fought for our freedom in 1994 when he was barely in his twenties. Now, at 30 years old, my brother is fighting for our homeland. It seems like a never-ending cycle.

The roots of the recent conflict goes back to the USSR, where borders were drawn without considering ethnic and religious differences. The decision of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader at the time, to make generous overnight territorial gifts put the overwhelmingly Armenian-populated Artsakh region under the control of Soviet Azerbaijan. In 1988, thousands of civil activists in Artsakh and Armenia demanded for the constitutional rights of Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh to become part of Soviet Armenia. Azerbaijani forces organized mass killings of Armenians in the Azerbaijani town Sumgai to suppress Armenian demands. This violence recalled painful memories from the 1915 Armenian genocide, causing the conflict to escalate and become one of the most deadly and devastating post-Soviet wars: thousands were killed and half a million displaced people never had the chance to return home.

I never knew my personal life would become one of these stories. Looking back to 2020 when Armenia lost in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War, the emotional weight of going home to my native mountains after finishing high school was incomparably heavy; I had a three-month break before attending my dream college and opening a new page in my academic journey. But my psyche was not ready to embrace this chapter of my future. It was unclear whether we could ever recover from our loss in the summer after the second Nagorno-Karabakh War. While I was coping with the academic stress, my peers were protecting our homeland with their blood. Life forced them to bear weapons in their twenties without having much choice.

And now my home is under attack. Again.

Almost every town and village in Armenia has a special memorial dedicated to honoring the death of civilians and soldiers. The astonishing beauty of Armenian mountains recalled vivid memories of my childhood and how peaceful I felt inside my naive self. Because Armenia has a tiny population and a need to defend itself, the male-identifying population is required by law to complete a two-year mandatory military service when they turn 18. As such, the ones who die for peace are recently graduated high schoolers who have not had the opportunity to live their lives before dying for their native land. And among all the servicemen killed, the overwhelming majority were barely in their twenties.

The conflict touched almost every Armenian family. While the human lives are the most irreversible loss, the psychological and infrastructural damage should not be understated. The consequences of this war tainted my personal and my family’s lives. The indifference of the world towards this small landlocked Caucasian country and the labeling of the conflict — which is an indivisible part of Armenian and Azeri identity — as “clashes” by western media coverage shows how subjective the outside world can be. Indeed, the lack of awareness by the international community concerning the true consequences of the war has exacerbated the negative side effects of post-war recovery.

While the Armenian people are trying to find resources to help displaced refugees and soldier recovery houses are full of patients, the psychological damage of this war is barely discussed. But this war, and its consequences, are deeply felt by those who have experienced it, and is not something to be forgotten.