President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Peter Maurer announced a fourfold increase in the ICRC contingent in Nagorno-Karabakh.
"As the conflict erupted, we realized that we needed to do more. If the budget of our mission in the region was 10 million Swiss francs before the war, then next year it will be 45 million. We will quadruple our presence. We had quite a few people there and are now planning to send an additional 400-500 people to the region," he said.
The ICRC President added that the Red Cross has offices in Baku, Yerevan, and the committee's representatives are returning to Khankendi, with plans to open one or two more offices.
The task of IRC mission staff will be to assist victims from all sides of the conflict. One of the urgent tasks is to search and identify the bodies of the victims.
"The difficulty is the front line, where there were battles and mines, which makes it hard to find corpses," Maurer said.
According to him, the ICRC has established protocols and best practices to "perform this work as dignifiedly as possible, to identify the bodies and hand them over to relatives."
