Azat fought to the end. Soldier Azat Simonyan was 19 years old. On 1 April he called his mother, “I am well Mom. I love you all. Please kiss my sisters. I am going to the positions. There is no connection there. Don’t worry,” those were the last words of the soldiers as the village head Zarzand Yegoryan said.
The enemy attacked suddenly. The boys fought for two hours. They shot at Azat. He was wounded in the body in two places but continued the battle. He had two gunshot wounds and a splinter on his body. He continued fight. The third bullet was fatal, had hit the head.
Azat’s home is far. His mother is not in the home, but as the hero wrote in his Facebook page ‘she was crying as she was missing her son, this time she was crying over his dead body.
Azat fell on the forefront. He died as none of us would like to die. He died in pain, but died heroically.
“My soul is sad, my heart is hard; my life has stopped and does not move. It gives me blues, I yearn my house,” he wrote.
“Azat, you returned!” a woman’s cry was heard at the funeral, then again science, and only sounds of tears and mourning.
In his native village Kamaris he was buried without spades. Everyone present fill a handful of soil in his grave. “Don’t use spades, let the boys do it with bare hands,” they said. At the end the people in this village decided, “No one in the village shall speak about Azat in the past tense. He is alive with us and in our memories.”
Azat could become a good programmer, he was a purposeful and kind boy.
“We had gone to Noravank. The boys were fishing at the riverside. One of the boys had brought down a nest from the tree and put it in the water. Azat saw the nest and the fledgelings in it. He jumped into the water in clothes, took the nest out and put it in its place,” Arto hakobyan, teacher of Kamaris secondary school remembered.:
Azat was among the 18 victims whose corpse were returned from Azerbaijan by the efforts of the Armenian Red Cross. His reliatives came to the morgue to recognize him. According to the relatives there were gunshot wounds on Azat’s body, “Also two splinters were in the body. He was a patriotic fellow, and continued to fight even being wounded. There are the traces,” Boris Tovmasyan, Azat’s uncle’s grandson said.
In addition he told that tendons on Azata’s lrgs were cut off. “They were cut after he had died. Well this is vandalism, to scourge a man even after death,” he said.
Gevorg Tosunyan
