PARIS (Reuters) - The United States, France and Russia are to send envoys to Azerbaijan, Armenia and to Nagorno-Karabakh in a bid to resolve the conflict that has flared up in the border region, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Tuesday.

“We can see that military conflict cannot be the solution, nor is the status quo,” he told reporters after talks with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is also going to send a fact-finding mission, said Steinmeier, whose country is chair of the OSCE.

According to Azerbaijan, some 16 Azeri servicemen have been killed in fighting around the Armenian-backed region in two days, as a flare-up of the decades-old conflict showed no sign of abating.

In the early 1990s, Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a war over the mountainous territory, whose population are mostly ethnic Armenian, in the early 1990s in which thousands were killed on both sides, and hundreds of thousands displaced.

A return to conflict could drag in Russia, which has a defense alliance with Armenia, and NATO member Turkey, which backs its ethnic kin in Azerbaijan.