First Nagorno-Karabakh War
By the end of the year, all the Azerbaijanis who had remained in Armenia were being expelled, while in the Armenian countryside, dozens of villages were abandoned by the deported; Armenian gangs attacked Azerbaijani villages where many residents had to face torture, see their houses burned, and escape on foot. Yunusov conducted a two-year-long research with Azerbaijani refugees and revealed that 216 Azerbaijanis in total died in 1998; most of them were murdered by Armenians while some were burned to death, froze to death as they fled into Azerbaijan, took their own lives or died in Azerbaijani hospitals.