THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE - During WWI, The Young Turk political faction of the Ottoman Empire sought the creation of a new Turkish state extending into Central Asia.  Those promoting the ideology called "Pan Turkism" (creating a homogenous Turkish state) now saw its Armenian minority population as an obstacle to the realization of that goal.

On April 24, 1915, several hundred Armenian community leaders and intellectuals in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) were arrested, sent east, and put to death.  In May, after mass deportations had already begun, Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha, claiming that Armenians could offer aid and comfort to the enemy and were in a state of imminent rebellion, ordered their deportation into the Syrian desert.

The adult and teenage males were separated from the deportation caravans and killed under the direction of Young Turk functionaries.  Women and children were driven for months over mountains and desert, often raped, tortured, and mutilated.  Deprived of food and water and often stripped of clothing, they fell by the hundreds of thousands along the routes to the desert.  Ultimately, more than half the Armenian population, 1,500,000 people were annihilated.  In this manner the Armenian people were eliminated from their homeland of several millennia.  More...