Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has raised his country's flag in the main city of the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, the city known as Xankendi to Azeris and Stepanakert to the territory's ethnic Armenians.
Aliyev's visit to the region on October 15, which Azerbaijan regained control of in a lightning offensive in September, was his first in his two decades of rule.
"The president of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has raised the national flag of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the city of Xankendi and delivered a speech," Aliyev's office said in a statement.
Azerbaijan's 24-hour offensive last month ended three decades of rule by ethnic Armenians in the region, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars in the last three decades over the region, which had been a majority ethnic Armenian enclave since the Soviet collapse.
The region initially came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces, backed by the Armenian military, in separatist fighting that ended in 1994. During a war in 2020, however, Azerbaijan took back parts of Nagorno-Karabakh along with surrounding territory that Armenian forces had claimed during the earlier conflict.
Nearly 100,000 ethnic Armenians, most of the region's ethnic-Armenian population, fled to Armenia after the latest offensive by Azerbaijan effectively gave Baku control over the rest of the region.
Aliyev's office said he visited several other places and towns in Nagorno Karabakh, including the cities of Agdara (Martakert) and Xocali (Ivanyan), where he also raised the Azerbaijani flag. He was shown in military attire during the flag raisings and during a visit to the Sarsang Reservoir in which he was seen in sunglasses looking at the water and surrounding mountains.
October 15 marked the 20th anniversary of Aliyev taking power as Azerbaijan's president.