Sanam Chagharyan first sensed something terrible had happened to her 20-year-old son Aghasi, an Armenian soldier serving on the Nagorno-Karabakh frontline, when she could no longer reach him by phone. More than 23 years later, she still does not know where he is.

“I went to the post office and tried to talk to my son on the phone,” recollects Chagharyan, a 66-year-old resident of Aygedzor, an Armenian village a few kilometers from the Azerbaijani border. “Every time [I called,] different soldiers would answer my call, trying to hide that he’s not in the military unit.”

Chagharyan says she spent days and nights in Aygedzor’s post office, using its public phone. It took three months for her to learn about an Azerbaijani ambush on her son’s eight-person unit. The Armenian army never confirmed his death.

To this day, she believes Aghasi, the youngest of her three sons, is alive.

“I think that it’s not possible that my son is dead. He’s not one of those guys [who died].”