'I will never go back' - Death stalks the exodus of refugees

The day the shelling began, Genadi Hyusunts had just taken his four-day-old son home from the hospital.

- Andrew Roth

Within hours, he had to hustle his wife, the newborn child and his six other children to the shelter in his native Martakert, which sits in Nagorno-Karabakh on the frontline of a three-decade conflict with Azerbaijan.

There, his breastfeeding wife and family faced days of hunger and sleeplessness in an overcrowded basement, as he headed for the frontline as part of a desperate defence of what Armenians see as their ancestral homeland.

"We didn't have a place to sleep, we didn't see a bed and in the very last days we didn't have anything to eat," said his sister, Gayane Shagants.

Hyusunts was one of several thousand refugees to have left Nagorno-Karabakh since last Sunday. His face darkened when asked about the short stint he served before the Nagorno-Karabakh defence forces laid down their arms, effectively ending more than 30 years of self-rule by ethnic Armenians.

"I can not talk about that," he said.

Just a week later, they were standing in the centre of Goris, a resort town near the border with Armenia that is now at the centre of an exodus of refugees that could swell up to 120,000 people. Every hour, hundreds more refugees are coming into the city in a convoy leaving Stepanakert, the Nagorno-Karabakh capital, that snakes for nearly 100km to the mountain serpentine that leads into Armenia.

After housing thousands of refugees, the border towns appear in danger of being overwhelmed.

As a heavy rain began to fall on Monday, a young girl sobbed into her mother's trouser leg in Goris as they stood on the street holding a plastic-wrapped package on a street corner.

"I built my home for 30 years and the only thing that I have with me is this bag," said Shagants. "My home is in this bag. They should be very happy that we are leaving because we left our homes to them."