The Young Turks cleanse the Ottoman Empire of Christians
The Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire is the most cited “other Holocaust” in modern history, but it is historically the first event to be called “genocide.” What you might have known is that the targets were their own Christian citizens. What might surprise you is that Turkey still denies it ever happened.
From 1915 to 1923, under the leadership of the Young Turks, the Ottoman Empire took hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian women and children without warning and separated them from their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Able-bodied men were worked to death in forced labor camps while their families were made to march through hundreds of miles of Syrian desert without food or water. Turks were free to rob, rape, and kill anyone in the line, leaving a path of bodies between prison camps and lining the banks of the Euphrates.
When they finally reached their destination in the Syrian desert, the exhausted survivors found no preparations for their arrival. Anyone near death was brought to an extermination camp to be mercifully put out of their misery in mass poisonings, if they weren’t drowned, burned, or shot along the way.
By 1919, Ottoman officials were being charged by international courts for their crimes against humanity, but nothing ultimately came of it. The Armenians got their revenge soon after, as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s “Operation Nemesis” hunted down and killed several high-ranking politicians and generals in the Ottoman Empire.
