ARMENIAN MASSACRES

Murder and expulsion of Turkish Armenians by the Ottoman Empire under Abdülhamid II in 1894–96 and by the Young Turk government in 1915–16.

In 1894, when the Armenians began agitating for territorial autonomy and protesting against high taxes, Ottoman troops and Kurdish tribesmen killed thousands. In 1896, hoping to call attention to their plight, Armenian revolutionaries seized the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul. Mobs of Muslim Turks, abetted by elements of the government, killed more than 50,000 Armenians in response. Sporadic killings occurred over the next two decades. In response to Russia's use of Armenian troops against the Ottomans in World War I (1914–18), the government deported 1.75 million Armenians south to Syria and Mesopotamia, in the course of which some 600,000 Armenians were killed or died of starvation.