Three years pass since Sugovushan's liberation from Armenian occupation

Azerbaijan's armed forces liberated eight villages including the strategic Sugovushan settlement in the Tartar district of Azerbaijan on October 3, 2020.

President Ilham Aliyev announced the liberation of the villages in two separate posts published to his official Twitter account on the evening of October 3.

"Today Azerbaijan's army hoisted our flag over Madagiz. Madagiz is ours. Karabakh is Azerbaijan," read the post. On the same day, President Aliyev announced that he reinstated the historical Azerbaijani name of Madagiz and as of October 3, 2020, the settlement is called Sugovushan.

Sugovushan is a village in the Tartar district of Azerbaijan, 332 kilometres west of the capital Baku. It was part of the Aghdara district in the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Following Armenia's military campaign to occupy Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the parliament of Azerbaijan revoked the special status of Aghdara in 1992 and ordered the allocation of its territory to Tartar, as well as to the currently occupied Aghdam, and Kalbajar districts.

The Saint Yelisey monastery consists of seven churches and was founded during the reign of the ancient Azerbaijani state of Caucasian Albania in the fifth century located in Sugovushan. Caucasian Albania existed in the territory of Azerbaijan from the 6th century BC to the 8th century AD and was unrelated to modern-day Albania.

Armenia's forces occupied Sugovushan during the war in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan in 1994 and deployed military units there after the occupation. The military unit № 49971 in the village was said to be one of the strongest footholds of Armenia in the occupied Azerbaijani territories. Moreover, the military unit № 33651, known as "the sixth defence district" of the Armenian troops was also stationed in Sugovushan.

On October 4, 2021, President Aliyev raised the flag of Azerbaijan in Sugovushan.

"The liberation of Sugovushan was of great strategic importance because the location of this settlement played an important role in the subsequent course of the war, and the fact that the settlement was in our hands gave us an advantage in our future operations," the Azerbaijani leader said in his speech in Sugovushan.

The Sugovushan settlement is also home to the Sugovushan reservoir. The reservoir is of great strategic significance. This reservoir, along with the Sarsang reservoir, was built on the initiative of national leader Heydar Aliyev in 1976. The main purpose of these reservoirs was to supply water to the regions located outside the administrative boundaries of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region - Tartar, Barda, Aghdam, Goranboy, and other districts.

As a result of the liberation of Sugovushan, water has been supplied to 30,000 hectares of land that were not irrigated or were irrigated insufficiently before. The government of Azerbaijan rolled out immediate measures to repair the canals destroyed by Armenians, as well as to effectively use the existing water resources in the liberated lands – East Zangezur and Karabakh economic zones.

Currently, new water reservoirs and tourism infrastructure are being built in Sugovushan. In May 2023, a rowing tournament with the participation of over 100 athletes from 20 countries took place in Sugovushan.