System Of A Down recently released their first new music in 15 years to raise awareness of the humanitarian crisis currently happening in Artsakh and Armenia, and to raise funds for those seeking aid. The band detailed some of the background of that crisis in a statement they shared with new songs "Protect The Land" and "Genocidal Humanoidz," and now vocalist Serj Tankian and bassist Shavo Odadjian have expanded on it further in a new interview with Fox 11 Los Angeles. "This is a fight for civilization," Serj said. "This is a fight against terrorism. So the whole world should be involved in this." He continued:
I was thinking of the United States and how we were formed as a nation and the independence movement. And how, imagine if England came back 26 years later after U.S.’s independence in 1776 with a grand army, huge military ships and just attacked. What would Americans do? Would they just say this used to be a colony? So this is not our land we should leave or would they fight? For their survival and their families, the Armenians of Artsakh are indigenous to those lands since 500 B.C. They have lived on those lands forever. They've never lived under any other jurisdiction, including Azerbaijan. Joseph Stalin stole those lands in 1921 and decided to redraw the map. But Armenians have always lived there autonomously. And so in 1994, they won their independence through a war with Azerbaijan and it should have been all settled there. But Azerbaijan took 26 years to arm themselves, use xenophobia to train their children, to hate us in a really horrible racist fashion, as we can all see it, you know, everywhere on the media right now. And they attacked with the help of Turkey, Erdogan of Turkey. They’ve brought in mercenaries over from Syria and Armenian forces are fighting Turkish forces and also mercenaries jihadis. Now, this war is going to destabilize the whole region. It already is destabilizing, the whole region with Russia and Iran on the border.