Thirty-five-year-old Azerbaijani tractor driver Elshad Alakbarov still remembers the day he lost his father. It was June 15, 1992, amidst full-fledged conflict over nearby Nagorno Karabakh. Alakbarov was 10 years old.

"My mother had cooked khangal [an Azerbaijani pasta dish], my father had just started to eat it, and the bus [for volunteer fighters] came for him. He left and never came back."

Only 67 of the estimated 420 volunteer militia survived that day’s attack on the Agdara regional village of Sirxavand, on Karabakh’s eastern side, recalls Alakbarov’s uncle, Hidayat Mustafaev, who was among the fighters. Mubariz Alakbarov, a 36-year-old tractor driver from the village of Kichikli, to the east in Agdam, was one of 15 men injured.

“I bandaged his arm and put him in a car,” Mustafayev, 62, says. Amidst intense fighting, the car, apparently hit by a projectile, exploded and crashed. “When we reached the car, we could not find anyone."

Alakbarov now numbers among the 3,127 Azerbaijani servicemen whose whereabouts, nearly 24 years after the Karabakh cease-fire, remain unknown, according to the State Commission on Prisoners, the Missing and Hostages. Soldiers account for the vast majority of the registered missing.

Overall, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that some 4,500 Azerbaijanis and Armenians disappeared since 1992, when large-scale fighting began, but cautions that the information is not exact.

At the start of the conflict, families say that it was possible to establish direct contact with the Armenian side to try and locate their missing relatives.