More than 84,700 people have fled the historically and ethnically Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region, RIA news agency cited the Armenian government as saying on Friday.
Armenians are fleeing the region after the Azerbaijani military's lightning campaign last week, which asserted their authority.
The Nagorno-Karabakh government said Thursday it will dissolve itself and the unrecognised republic will cease to exist by year's end after a three-decade bid for independence.
A decree signed by the President Samvel Shakhramanyan cited a 20 September agreement to end the fighting under which Azerbaijan will allow the “free, voluntary and unhindered movement” of Nagorno-Karabakh residents to Armenia.
Some of those who fled the regional capital, Stepanakert, said they had no hope for the future.
“I left Stepanakert having a slight hope that maybe something will change and I will come back soon, and these hopes are ruined after reading about the dissolution of our government,” 21-year-old student Ani Abaghyan told The Associated Press.
Lawyer Anush Shahramanyan, 30, lamented that “we can never go back to our homes without having an independent government in Artaskh," referring to Nagorno-Karabakh by its Armenian name.
The mass exodus of ethnic Armenians from the mountainous region began Sunday. By Thursday morning, 74,400 people - more than 60 per cent of Nagorno-Karabakh’s population of 120,000 - had fled to Armenia, and the influx continued unabated, according to Armenian officials.
In December, Azerbaijan blockaded the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, alleging the Armenian government was using it for illicit weapons shipments to the region’s defence forces.
Instead, Azerbaijan denied the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh basic food, fuel supplies and medicine.
Weakened by the blockade and with Armenia's leadership distancing itself from the conflict, ethnic Armenian forces in the region agreed to lay down arms less than 24 hours after Azerbaijan began its offensive last week.
Talks have begun between officials in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and Nagorno-Karabakh's authorities on “reintegrating” the region into Azerbaijan, but given the country's authoritarian rule, lack of human rights and normalised Armenophobia, the Armenian population would rather flee to Armenia,
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