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Centuries of persecution -

The Armenian minority in Ottoman Turkey had been subject to sporadic persecutions for centuries. In 1894, the Armenians in the Sasun region in Eastern Anatolia (in present-day eastern Turkey) refused to pay an unjust tax. In reply, Ottoman troops and Kurdish tribesmen killed thousands of Armenians in the region. The feared Hamidiye cavalry regiments (pictured) played a major role in what became known as the Armenian massacres of 1894-96. The Hamidiye plundered and murdered with impunity, and were never held responsible for their actions.

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Population count -

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were about 2.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, mostly concentrated in the six provinces of Eastern Anatolia.

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Abdul Hamid II (1842–1918) -

Presiding over this period was Abdul Hamid II. He was the last sultan to exert any effective control over an increasingly fractured Ottoman Empire.

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Power struggle -

In 1908, a small group of Ottoman revolutionaries—the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), an organization within the broader Young Turks movement—came to power after overthrowing Abdul Hamid II. One of its key leaders was Enver Pasha.

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The Young Turks -

The Young Turks (pictured) was an opposition movement in favor of a more modern constitutional government. At first, Armenians welcomed the new order, hopeful that they would have an equal place at the table.

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Adana massacre -

But in April 1909, an uprising against the CUP largely led by Islamist reactionaries triggered the April 13 massacre of over 30,000 Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims in the city of Adana.

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A new order -

Adana proved a turning point. Increasingly authoritarian, the Young Turks consolidated power and sidelined their more liberal opponents. The ambition now was to "Turkify" the empire. Non-Turks—and especially Christian non-Turks—were seen as a serious threat to the new state.

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Enver Pasha (1881–1922) -

In January 1913, Enver Pasha, who was one-third of the dictatorial triumvirate known as the "Three Pashas" (along with Talaat Pasha and Cemal Pasha), seized power in a coup d’état.

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First Balkan War (1912–1913) -

Enver Pasha came to power during the First Balkan War. Resentment towards the Armenian minority was further fueled after the Ottoman Empire suffered a humiliating defeat in this conflict, a loss blamed on the treachery of Balkan Christians.

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Second Balkan War (1913) -

The Second Balkan War broke out in June 1913 and involved Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece. The outcome of this war, in which Bulgaria had to cede portions of its First Balkan War gains to Serbia, Greece, and Romania, led indirectly to the outbreak of the First World War.

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The rapid decent into world conflict -

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo. It was another key event that precipitated a rapid descent into global conflict.

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The First World War -

In 1914, the Turks entered the First World War on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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Fear of Armenian independence -

One of the biggest fears Turkish military leaders held was the possibility of Armenians siding with the enemy and winning their independence in the wake of an Allied victory.

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Siding with the Allies -

In fact, Armenians did indeed organize volunteer battalions (pictured) to help the Russian army fight against the Turks in the Caucasus region.

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The "removal" of Armenians -

By now loathed as traitors, Armenian troops as well as civilians were marked out by the Turkish government for "removal" from the war zones along the Eastern Front. Pictured is Armenian hero General Ozanian Zoravar Andranik with troops in the Caucasus. Andranik was a key figure of the Armenian national liberation movement.

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Battle of Sarikamish -

In January 1915, Enver Pasha attempted to push back the Russians at the Battle of Sarikamish, only to suffer the worst Ottoman defeat of the war. Pasha blamed his failure on Armenian treachery (at the outbreak of war some Armenian combatants had chosen to fight for the Axis powers).

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The genocide begins -

Soon afterwards on April 24, 1915, a humiliated Enver Pasha initiated the deportations (pictured) and wholesale massacres of Armenians. The Armenian genocide had begun.

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Death in Constantinople -

In Constantinople, Talaat Pasha had several hundred Armenian intellectuals rounded up, arrested, and later executed.

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Death marches -

From 1915, inspired by rabid nationalism and secret government orders, Turks drove ordinary Armenians from their homes and sent them on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. People who stopped to rest were shot.

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A campaign of mass murder -

A systematic campaign of mass murder was carried out by irregular forces as well as by local Kurds and Circassians (people from the northwestern region of the Caucasus).

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The plight of Christians -

Meanwhile, Young Turks created special death squads to target Christian elements. Pictured here is the former Armenian village of Sheykhalan near Mush after a raid.

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The fate of refugees -

As the massacres progressed, the Turkish countryside became littered with Armenian corpses. Through this sickening landscape trod lines of refugees forced to march to concentration camps in the southern Ottoman Empire (today northern and eastern Syria, northern Saudi Arabia, and Iraq).

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Children targeted -

Armenian children were specifically targeted by government squads, kidnapped and converted to Islam before being given away to Turkish families.

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Brutality towards women -

The fate of Armenian women and girls was equally terrifying. Many were sexually assaulted before being placed in Turkish 'harems' or made to serve as slaves.

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The world wakes up -

Atrocities continued into 1916 before the rest of the world woke up to the Armenians' plight. Here, an encampment of refugees gather on the deck of a French cruiser that rescued them.

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Humanitarian help -

The plight of the Armenians triggered an unprecedented public philanthropic response in the United States, with over US$110 million (more than $1 billion adjusted for inflation) raised by volunteers to assist Armenian refugees and orphans.

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Liberation -

Intentional, state-sponsored killing of Armenians mostly ceased by the end of January 1917. As the British Army advanced in 1917 and 1918 northwards through the Levant, they liberated around 100,000 to 150,000 Armenians working for the Ottoman military under atrocious conditions.

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Murder map -

This map of Armenia, and parts of Turkey, Russia and Syria, indicates every place, with the exception of those included in square brackets, where deportations, massacres, or both took place between April and November 1915.

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Final death toll -

Most historians accept that between 800,000 and one million people were killed in the Armenian genocide. Of the 2.5 millions Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacres, just 388,000 remained by 1922.

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Memorial and denial -

Today, the Armenian Genocide Memorial complex on a hill above Yerevan commemorates the massacres. Turkey, meanwhile, has steadily refused to recognize that the events of 1915–16 constitute a genocide.

Sources: (Holocaust Encyclopedia) (The Genocide Education Project)  (Britannica) (The New York Times) (Genocide Studies Program - Yale University) (History) 

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