Armenian refugees in the Caucasus
An Armenian refugee camp in the Caucasus, 1920.
What Was the Armenian Genocide?
Some 600,000 to more than 1,000,000 Armenians died during a deportation carried out by the Ottoman government in 1915–16.
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- genocide
From 1915 to 1916 hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported from their homeland in the eastern Ottoman Empire by the Young Turk government, which viewed them as a possible ally of Russia in World War I. Many were murdered or died from disease or starvation; conservative estimates of the number of Armenians who died range from 600,000 to more than 1,000,000. The events of 1915–16 are widely considered to be an instance of genocide, but the Turkish government has refused to recognize them as such.