Cardi B branded ‘terrorism supporter’ & forced to apologize after unwittingly getting entangled in Nagorno-Karabakh politics

Rapper Cardi B was flooded with online attacks and forced to apologize after promoting an Armenian fundraiser amid the country’s escalating conflict with the neighboring Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory.

The US singer, whose latest single ‘WAP’ topped UK charts in September, provoked backlash after she shared a poster for a fundraising campaign for Armenian victims of the ongoing military conflict on her Instagram on Tuesday. The deluge of reactions apparently forced the star to delete her post and apologize. She admitted she did not research the topic before promoting the fundraiser. 

“I didn’t know that this is a war between two countries,” the rapper said after revealing she received plenty of negative comments and messages from Azeri users. Cardi B explained that she didn’t know much about the historic conflict in the Caucasus, and was convinced to spread the word about the fundraiser by her Armenian business adviser.

The musician refused to declare support for either Armenia or Azerbaijan. “You guys already have big pieces of land, there’s no little tiny land that is worth chaos, death, fighting,” she said, adding, “I hope there’s peace over there.” 

However, Cardi B’s apology apparently wasn’t enough, and she soon recorded another message, saying that now both countries’ supporters were pressuring her online to denounce the other one.
“I don’t know what to believe!” the provocative rapper said. “One side’s telling me something, the other side is telling me something else…Why do you keep harassing me if I already apologized?” 

She reiterated that she just wants peace in the region, as her second apology turned into more of a rant in which she screamed that she “doesn’t know” enough about the conflict.

The backlash following the fundraiser promotion was indeed pretty severe, as Cardi B appears to have been targeted by several organized campaigns. She received plenty of identical comments criticizing her Instagram post, and the hashtag “Cardi B supports terrorism” was launched by some of her critics on Twitter.

Cardi B was not the first big US celebrity to weigh in on the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict online. Armenian-American reality TV star Kim Kardashian West tweeted her support for Armenia amid the border clashes with Azerbaijan at the end of September. Unlike Cardi B, Kardashian appeared to have been confident in throwing her support behind her ancestral homeland, and hasn’t retracted any of it, despite also receiving her share of negative comments.

The hostilities in the region started on September 27 and have since become some of the most violent in the conflict’s history, with casualties on both sides, most of them among civilians.

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