Five Lesser Known Genocides

Published February 26, 2013
Updated September 12, 2019

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.

author
All That's Interesting
author
A New York-based publisher established in 2010, All That's Interesting brings together subject-level experts in history, true crime, and science to share stories that illuminate our world.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.