Armenian genocide

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The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches from the Turkish-dominated Anatolia to the Syrian desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Alongside the concurrent Assyrian and Greek genocides, the Armenian genocide enabled the creation of an ethnonationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey. Before World War I, Armenians occupied a somewhat protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians had occurred in the 1890s and 1909. The Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses, especially during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars. CUP leaders turned to radical Turkish nationalism to preserve the empire and grew paranoid that Armenians, whose...

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