08/11/2022
Large-scale massacres of occurred in the 1890s and 1909. The Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses—especially the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars—leading to fear among CUP leaders that the Armenians, whose homeland in eastern Anatolia was viewed as the of the Turkish nation, would also attempt to free of the empire. During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory, Ottoman paramilitaries local Armenians. Ottoman leaders took isolated indications of Armenian resistance as evidence of a widespread rebellion, even though no such rebellion existed. deportation was intended as the "definitive solution to the Armenian Question"[4] and to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or . Armenian in the Ottoman were pursuant to a February order, and were later killed. On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders from Constantinople (now Istanbul). At the orders of Talaat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenian women, children, and elderly or infirm people were sent on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, r**e, and massacre. In the Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into . In 1916, of was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of 1916.
