Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom's (USCIRF) Nadine Maenza has expressed concern over Azerbaijan's plans to remove Armenian Apostolic inscriptions from churches.

"We urge the government to preserve and protect places of worship and other religious and cultural sites," the USCIRF cited Maenza as saying on Tuesday, February 8.

Maenza's remarks came after media reports that Azerbaijan’s government has announced that it intends to erase Armenian inscriptions on religious sites in the territory that came under Baku's control in the 2020 war.

Concerns about the preservation of cultural sites in Nagorno-Karabakh are made all the more urgent by the Azerbaijani government’s history of systemically destroying indigenous Armenian heritage—acts of both warfare and historical revisionism. The Azerbaijani government has secretly destroyed a striking number of cultural and religious artifacts in the late 20th century. Within Nakhichevan alone, a historically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani forces destroyed at least 89 medieval churches, 5,840 khachkars (Armenian cross stones) and 22,000 historical tombstones between 1997 and 2006.