On September 12, 2022, Gayane, a forty-two-year-old mother of four, made a brief phone call to her eight-year-old son, Hayk (real name withheld), to check in and let him know she would be unreachable for a while. Just weeks earlier, she had been deployed with her army regiment to patrol the town of Sotk, the last Armenian town before the Azerbaijani border. Neither Gayane nor Hayk could have imagined that this would be the last time they would hear the other’s voice. Mere hours later, Azeri forces launched a series of artillery and drone attacks against military positions and civilian infrastructure over the border. These clashes claimed the lives of almost three hundred service personnel in just two days of fighting.

As the news broke, Gayane’s sister Lala began calling hospitals near the front lines to see if her sister Gayane was among the casualties that were being treated. “There was a live map of the war, so when we checked we saw [that the area where Gayane was deployed had been taken over]. We understood she was [dead], so the next step was to find her,” Lala says from a coffee shop in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.

Lala spent the next couple of days looking for her missing sister in Azeri Telegram channels. She knew that, in this war, it had become common to be brutally mistreated, with videos of such acts posted online. “It is sad to say but that was the advantage we had to search for her,” she says. “Because she was a woman, we were sure they would post a video.”