evidence: Fierce firefights and heavy shelling echo once again around the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh, an isolated region at the very edge of Europe that has seen several major wars since the fall of the Soviet Union. On Tuesday, the South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan announced its armed forces launched "local anti-terrorist activities" in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is inside Azerbaijan’s borders but is controlled as a breakaway state by its ethnic Armenian population. Now, with fighting raging and allegations of an impending "genocide" reaching fever pitch, all eyes are on the decades-old conflict that threatens to draw in some of the world’s leading military powers.