The Armenian Genocide

A witness from Sıvas, G. Kapigian, related how he lived for three months in this primarily Kurdish town, the seat of a kaza that was administratively attached to the mutesarifat of Urfa. This convoy of yesir (prisoners of war) – the local population’s word for the Armenian deportees – that arrived in Suruc on 5/18 September 1915 was stationed in a field located near the exit from the city, where four big tents had been set up. Pitching the tents was more or less all that the authorities had done to accommodate these yesir, many of whom were ill. The municipal physician could only remind them that “we are not allowed to give sick deportees medicine.”² It was also impossible to send a telegram to a friend or family member in the capital to request that he or she send money. The survivors in this convoy, who had been pillaged on the way, had all but run out of resources and understood that they were going to suffer the fate of a group of the few hundred women and children who had arrived before them, whose corpses lay rotting behind the city’s khan as food for dogs.³ The khan, consisting of miniscule cells, was in fact a deathtrap into which the authorities packed those deportees who were devoured by lice and disease and had only a few hours to live.⁴ These deportees were Armenians from Sıvas and Zara who had been brought to Suruc by way of Fırıncilar, where Kapigian had crossed their path a few weeks earlier. Wryly, he expressed his surprise over the magnificent “creation of the scientific spirit” that this “microbe incubator” invented by the Young Turks represented.⁵ For Kapigian, there could be no doubt that an institution like the khan in Suruc, which the authorities had christened a “hospital,” had been conceived of as microbe factories for the purpose of killing their “patients.”⁶ Once still-healthy deportees had been put in these houses of death, they rapidly lost their capacities and sank into a physical and moral decline that could end only one way. The Interior Ministry’s incessant requests for information from local government officials about how many deportees had recently arrived, where they had come from, and how many were still alive were doubtless motivated by only one desire – to evaluate the effects of these genocidal practices and add to the ministry’s statistics.

The deportees’ camp had received two visits. One was from the municipal physician, a Jew, who had explained to the camp’s inmates that the local authorities lacked the means required to feed them and that they would have to continue to fend for themselves until they reached Aleppo. A few days later, Kapigian encountered six Armenian women that the physician was keeping in his home. The other visit was from the commander of the gendarmerie, who contented himself with touring the camp and picking out one or two young women for his harem, which had already acquired respectable dimensions. The kaymakam himself was holding five such women. Furthermore, many Turkish and Kurdish families helped themselves to children, especially little girls under ten.⁷ This phenomenon was so widespread that it gives us reason to wonder whether this infatuation with young Armenians, with its biological connotations, did not originate in a campaign conducted by the authorities.

The fact that the second caravan from Erzerum, comprising Armenians from throughout the Erzerum region, arrived in Suruc in late November was itself a curiosity. Originally made up of around 10,000 people who had been put on the road on 18 June 1915,⁸ the convoy had, to be sure, been partially purged of its men, who were massacred after it passed through Fırıncilar, in Kanlıdere, by the çete chief Zeynel.⁹ Yet, its members had reached Suruc after suffering only a minimum of losses, in good order and even apparently good health, at least in comparison with their kinsmen from the Sıvas region. This case, which proves that it was not, in fact, impossible to “displace” Armenians populations without destroying them, indicates what conditions were required to escape the common fate.

The first explanatory factor put forward by the members of the convoy was money: deported very early, at a time when certain measures affecting the Armenians’ assets had not yet been adopted by the central authorities, this group had benefited from a certain indulgence on the part of the vali, Tahsin Bey, who had suggested to the deportees that they deposit their money in the bank and take checks with them. In so doing, he had saved them from being looted en route and made it possible for them to make use of their means as effectively as possible in order to bribe the various government official and tribal chiefs whom they encountered from one end of their journey to the other. Whereas the deportees who were carrying cash were quite likely to pay and be massacred nonetheless, the Erzerum Armenians maintained an ability to negotiate that stemmed from their financial independence.

The second decisive factor had to do with the means of transport that the deportees were able to obtain upon setting out and keep until they reached Suruc. Thanks to their horse-drawn wagons or ox-carts, they had been able to take with them what they needed for the journey: bedding, tents, food and supplies. Above all, they had been able to avoid travelling thousands of kilometers on foot, maintain minimal health standards, and avoid epidemics.¹⁰ In other words, this group was never caught up, unlike the great majority of the other convoys, in the spiral leading to physical and moral degradation. Kapigian observes that the savoir-faire possessed by the men, who had experience in conducting the toughest kinds of negotiations, provides the rest of the explanation for their success. Aware of the danger awaiting them in the deserts of Syria or Mesopotamia, a delegation from the second convoy from Erzerum paid the kaymakam of Suruc a “courtesy visit.” After conferring with one another, these men had come to the conclusion that they would have to negotiate the right to stay where they were with the local authorities. They were able to “convince the kaymakam of their loyalty to the fatherland and provide him with testimonials of their esteem for him” by tactfully offering him gifts out of range of prying eyes. The kaymakam of Suruc could obviously not issue an “official order” allowing these exemplary individuals to remain as long as they wished, but he could, for example, look the other way when these families rented houses in the town – the more so as the populace also benefited from this unlooked for source of income. The kaymakam’s “benevolence” also profited deportees from other regions who had managed to flee the camp in Arabpunar and take refuge in Suruc. Late in December, they were even able to make use of the services of the local agricultural bank in order to cash checks and found commercial enterprises.¹¹ On several occasions, particularly when the authorities set out to defeat the Armenians of the neighboring city of Urfa, tensions rose somewhat in Suruc, and the roughly 15,000 Armenian deportees in the city were threatened with expulsion to the desert.¹² They even camped for almost one month at a half-hour’s distance from the city. Many of them, however, were able to go back to Suruc and its environs once the tensions had abated.¹³ In winter 1915–16, the local authorities had to organize several convoys to the desert, probably in order to avoid sanctions that the capital threatened to impose; they did not, however, empty the region of all its deportees. Kapigian notes that a number of people from the poorest families fell victim to malnutrition and disease. Thereafter, the interior minister demanded an exact count of the Armenians in the region.¹⁴ Certain deportees tried to make themselves indispensable by creating a trade school in which the young women of the city could acquire manual skills and learn to read and write. Although these proposals were hard to reconcile with local social practices and surprised a good many people, others, such as the mayor of Suruc, turned the occasion to account, encouraging the initiative.¹⁵

As a result of pressure from the deportees, Suruc was transformed accordingly over the months into a place of relegation that was more or less secure for a number of them. According to Kapigian, of the nearly 700 Armenians who had set out from the region of Sıvas, listed in his account by their family names, 120 survived until they were expelled from Suruc for good.¹⁶ But even these vestiges of the convoys eventually attracted the central authorities’ attention. A military inspector dispatched by the court-martial in Urfa came to conduct an investigation in Suruc. The kaymakam and commander of the gendarmerie were the first to be threatened, accused of having benefited from the Armenians’ generosity. The deportation order was finally made public on 1 January 1916: it applied to the refugees and the handful of (Islamicized) local families, who were ordered to set out for Rakka in five days at the latest.¹⁷ Not even Erzerum’s businessmen were able to escape this ultimate roundup. On Sunday, 9 January, the convoy, comprising a total of 1,851 people, was put on the road to Rakka, guarded by gendarmes.¹⁸

Some ten kilometers further south, near the Arabpunar train station, another transit camp had been set up near a small lake.¹⁹ Around 25 September 1915, 15,000 deportees, most of whom came from the vilayet of Sıvas, camped here under conditions that were precarious, to say the least. Shortly thereafter, epidemics broke out, carrying off between 120 and 170 victims daily; Kapigian says that 4,000 people died here in six weeks. By mid-November, the camp was empty. Some of its population had been sent to Ras ul-Ayn and on to Der Zor or Mosul; others succeeded in hiding for a while in Suruc and villages in the vicinity.²⁰

Located east of Urfa and south of Dyarbekir, in a particularly desolate region near the outer limits of Syria and Mesopotamia, Ras ul-Ayn had been, before the Baghdad Railway went in, a simple way station comprising 20 or so households of Chechens who had been settled here by the Ottoman sultans after the 1877–8 Russo-Turkish War. In 1914, it was still the modest seat of a kaza; the following year, it became one of the main concentration camps for Armenian deportees. A remote spot far from the eyes of the curious, the village was gradually transformed into a vast “resettlement” center in late summer and in fall 1915. First, however, countless convoys from the Armenian provinces passed through it; the routes they took converged near Urfa and Ras ul-Ayn. The first deportees to arrive here came in mid-July; they were natives of Harput, Erzerum, and Bitlis.²¹ In approximately the same period, the American consul in Baghdad, Charles P. Brissel, noted in a report that the vali of Baghdad, when he had been the prefect of the sancak of Mardin, “began at and near Mardin, persecutions against the Armenians and sent them to Ras ul-Ayn. There is a report in Baghdad that the Armenians sent to Ras ul-Ayn were massacred some time after their arrival at that place or en route to it.”²² Subsequently, many other convoys coming from Urfa, where the first and second deportation routes intersected, also arrived in Ras ul-Ayn. We have, however, less information about the operations conducted in this region than about those in the camps in the western areas, for the diplomats who were stationed the closest to Ras ul-Ayn, the German consul Holstein and the American consul Brissel, lived in Mosul and Baghdad, more than 300 and 500 kilometers away, respectively, on the edge of the Mesopotamian desert, while Rössler and Jackson found it extremely difficult to follow developments from Aleppo. In his 13 August 1915 report, Rössler nevertheless revealed that he had been “able to obtain precise information about another group that had left Adiyaman [northeast of Urfa]. Of the six hundred ninety-six people who set out, three hundred twenty-one arrived in Aleppo: two hundred six men and fifty-seven women were killed.”²³ These figures attest the harassment to which the deportees were subjected on this road, which connected Malatia, a place of junction for the caravans of deportees, to Urfa and Ras ul-Ayn by way of Adiyaman. In the same report, Rössler wrote: “A group from Sıvas which arrived here [in Aleppo] on 12 August had been en route for three months and was utterly exhausted. A few of them died almost as soon as they arrived.”²⁴ The only outside account is provided by an Austrian officer who spoke Turkish, Lismayer, who had for 20 years been working on building the railroad in the area. For obvious reasons, his name is not mentioned by Rössler or the missionary from Urfa, Jacob Künzler, who transmitted the information that he was given by this engineer to Aleppo.²⁵ However, Balakian, who met him several weeks later, reveals his name when he mentions his account:²⁶

It was in the last days of October [1915]. Lismayer had been busy constructing a narrow-gauge railway between Sorğana and Ras-ul-Ayn when he saw a large column coming from the north and slowly descending toward Ras-ul-Ayn ... This mass of people moved slowly down the road, and only when it had drawn near did the Austrian realize that the army was made up, not of soldiers, but of an immense convoy of women guarded by gendarmes. On some estimates, there were as many as forty thousand women in the convoy ... There was not a single man among them.²⁷

Another engineer working on the Bagdadbahn, M. Graif, informed Dr. Niepage, a professor in Aleppo, “that along the entire trajectory of the railroad leading to Tell Abida and Ras ul-Ayn were piles of naked corpses of raped women,” while the German consul in Mosul, who had traveled on the road between Mosul and Aleppo, “had seen, in several places on the way, so many severed children’s hands that the road could have been paved with them.”²⁸ Another German consul and military officer, Scheubner-Richter, reports in a 5 November 1915 travel account: “From Erzerum to Mosul, traveling by way of Hinis, Mush, Bitlis, and Siirt, I saw that all the villages and houses once inhabited by Armenians had been sacked and were completely empty. I did not see a single Armenian man who was still alive.”²⁹

In the opposite direction, the Sub-Directorate of Deportees in Aleppo carried out the orders it had received from the capital: beginning in November-December 1915, the trend was reversed, and the deportees interned in the camps in Islahiye, Katma, and Azaz were sent to Ras ul-Ayn so that the strategic route between Adana and Aleppo could be cleared and decontaminated.³⁰ “They had started evacuating them by rail to Ras ul-Ayn,” a survivor writes.³¹ The city had, moreover, a very bad reputation,

based on the fact that all the unfortunate convoys from the interior provinces [that is, those which took the road from Urfa] that had been dispatched in that direction had, without exception, been massacred. The same fate awaited the deportees arriving by the Konya-Bozanti route who had had the bad luck to be conducted to Ras ul-Ayn. Arab gendarmes, government officials, and even a good part of the population sardonically gave them to understand the fate awaiting them. Some of them related episodes from previous massacres ... It had become impossible to obtain information about the first massacres in Ras ul-Ayn. The last fragments of the convoys from the interior who had gotten that far had basically all been massacred. There were no witnesses left.³²

On the account of J. Kheroyan, who in late October 1915 was appointed head of the concentration camp in Ras ul-Ayn under rather surprising circumstances, the camp contained, 10,000 tents when he assumed his post – that is, around 50,000 Armenian deportees – which were set up on a height ten minutes from the village.³³ As elsewhere, the deportees had pitched their tents practically one next to the other for reasons of security. The kaymakam, Yusuf Ziya Bey, who held his post until February 1916, proved to be above all a well-meaning man; his benevolence was encouraged by the mutesarif of Der Zor, Ali Suad Bey, who had authority over Ras ul-Ayn at the time. Ziya, who had control over all state officials, including those employed by the Sub-Directorate for Deportees, even allowed those deportees who could afford it to live in town. He also tolerated petty commerce at the local level and did his best to protect the camp against Arab marauders, who had been used to taking what they wanted from the deportees. For four months, from November 1915 to late February 1916, the Ras ul-Ayn camp operated under almost normal conditions for this sort of structure, in comparison to other institutions of the same kind. Convoys were, to be sure, regularly expedited to Der Zor, but without excessive brutality. However, an impromptu visit by Cevdet, the brother-in-law of Vice-Generalissimo Enver, seems to have had a very negative impact on the camp in Ras ul-Ayn. When he arrived in Ras ul-Ayn, Cevdet, who was on his way to Adana to assume his functions there, is supposed to have been shocked by the conditions the Armenian deportees enjoyed in the camp: the death rate, at the time, was only 100 a day³⁴ (around 13,000 to 14,000 people nevertheless lost their lives in the four months in which the camp functioned “normally”).³⁵ The importance of Cevdet’s intervention, said to be key to explaining why the deportees of the camp in Ras ul-Ayn were liquidated, should not be overestimated. The vali’s reputation as a bloodthirsty murderer, acquired in the Van region, influenced Kheroyan’s judgement. Obviously, Kheroyan could not know that at the same moment, as we shall see, Istanbul was setting the second phase of the genocide in motion, in both Asia Minor and Syria-Mesopotamia.

It may, however, be affirmed that former vali of Van had something to do with the fact that the kaymakam of Ras ul-Ayn was dismissed ten days after Cevdet passed through the area. He was replaced by a dyed-in-the-wool Young Turk, Kerim Refik Bey. This measure was a necessary precondition for carrying out the programmed events to come. Refik assumed office in mid-March and immediately set about accomplishing the task with which he had been entrusted – liquidating the deportees in the camp in Ras ul-Ayn. The preparations began on 17 March 1916 and continued until 21 March, when the operation intended systematically to eliminate the 40,000 internees who were still present commenced.³⁶ The kaymakam received a great deal of support here from Adıl Bey, the Director of Deportees, an “educated” native of Istanbul; the local Chechens, whose leader was none other than the mayor of Ras ul-Ayn, Arslan Bey; and the vice-mayor, Arslan’s brother Hüseyin Bey.³⁷ Officially, these irregulars were supposed to protect the deportees who were sent southward. In fact, they carried out decisions made by the Sub-Directorate of Deportees. A few months later, these irregulars would go on to play outstanding roles in the July 1916 massacres of those deported to Der Zor.

Initial reports of the liquidation of the deportees in the camp of Ras ul-Ayn reached Aleppo only in early April. The first dispatch from consul Rössler, dated 6 April 1916, refers only to a massacre perpetrated by “Cherkez.”³⁸ In his 27 April report, the consul was more precise:

On the report of a perfectly trustworthy German who spent several days in Ras ul-Ayn and the vicinity ... [e]very day, or nearly every day, three hundred to five hundred people are removed from the camp, taken to a place around ten kilometers from Ras ul-Ayn, and slaughtered. The bodies are thrown into the river known as Jirjib el Hamar ... The Chechens settled in the Ras ul-Ayn region are playing the executioners’ roles.³⁹

To form some idea of the dimensions of the carnage, one has to turn to the accounts left by the handful of survivors. Thus, the camp’s director, Kheroyan, states: “There were only a few hundred people left by 23 April [6 May]: the sick, the blind, invalids, and a few children ... After each convoy was sent off, we counted hundreds of victims, for whom big mass graves were dug.” Kheroyan concludes: “A few days after the departure of the last convoy, it was announced, on the kaymakam’s orders, that the operations of the concentration camp had been discontinued; he asked me to turn the registries over to him.”⁴⁰ The luckiest survived for a few more days, getting as far as the region of Sheddadiye in the Kabur valley, where they were killed.⁴¹

The vilayet of Mosul was part of the zone officially set aside as a place of “relegation” for the Armenian deportees. Because of its particular geographical situation on the edge of the Mesopotamian desert, it was supposed to serve as a place of exile for the deportees who followed the second deportation route – that is, Armenians from the vilayets of Bitlis and Dyarbekir and the southern part of the vilayet of Van, along with the vestiges of the two convoys that had set out from Erzerum. In other words, Mosul was the intended destination for deportees from zones in which massacres in situ had been especially frequent and the percentage of survivors who had reached their official destination was extremely low. Our main source of information about the region, the German consul in Mosul, Holstein, counted barely 600 women and children from Siirt and Mardin in the city on 21 July.⁴² According to Patriarch Zaven, who spent the last months of the war in Mosul, the deportees who arrived here after taking the route that led through Ras ul-Ayn and Cezire were the least numerous,⁴³ probably because those who followed that route fell victim to the squadrons of çetes whom the vali of Dyarbekir, Dr. Reşid, had sent out to intercept them. The third and fourth convoys from Erzerum, which arrived in Mosul by a more southerly route, suffered far fewer losses, but there was not a single man among them, only women and children.⁴⁴ According to Armenian sources, there were 1,600 deportees from Erzerum in the city of Mosul in February 1916 and 2,200 more in the region.⁴⁵

According to Holstein, 15,000 deportees had reached the region by the end of December 1915. A second wave of deportees, comprising Armenians from all the regions of Asia Minor, the western part of it in particular, arrived in Mosul and the vicinity in spring 1916; it had set out from Der Zor. Holstein reports that only 2,500 deportees, who, when Ali Suad was still mutesarif, had been sent from Der Zor down the desert road running from Zor through Suvar, Şeddadiye, Hassiçe, and Zamukha to Mosul, actually arrived in Mosul on 22 May 1916,⁴⁶ whereas all those who followed under Salih Zeki’s administration were killed on the way. In the same period, the American consul, Jackson, reported that there were around 5,000 deportees in Basra.⁴⁷

The information provided by Holstein in a 4 May 1916 report produced in response to a questionnaire from the Swiss charitable organization Schweizerisches Hilfswerk 1915 für Armenien, indicates that the death rate among the deportees was around 67 per cent. Holstein puts the number of deportees from the regions of Erzerum and Bitlis who had landed in Mosul, Kirkuk, or Süleymaniye at between 4,000 and 5,000. He also provides valuable insights into the way these groups were handled. They were “[composed] mainly of women and children [in] desperate plight.” “If one is to intervene usefully,” he added,

the deportees would, at the very least, have to have the right to remain once and for all in a single place and not be tossed back and forth – as was and is still the case – from one place to another, on the whim of the Turkish “special commissions” charged with dealing with these questions, which settle them without the least scruple ... Aid of any sort would only prolong their ordeal and postpone their miserable end for a few days more.⁴⁸

In other words, the authorities here applied methods of treatment similar to those employed in the concentration camps: the exiles never stayed for long in any one place and were regularly driven from one camp to the next. There is every reason to believe that this procedure was designed to prevent the deportees from acquiring means of survival after familiarizing themselves with their new environment.

The vali, Hayret Bey, the former mutesarif of Marash,⁴⁹ who held his post from May 1915 to August 1917, together with his successor Memduh Bey, were the main architects of the gradual destruction of these groups.⁵⁰ Captain Nevzâde Bey, the military commander in Mosul, and Colonel Abdülkadri Hilmi Bey personally took charge of executing the Armenian worker-soldiers who were building a highway between Mosul and Cezire.⁵¹ Captain Nâzım Bey, the commander of Mosul’s gendarmerie; Mehmed Kâmil, a Unionist journalist; and Nuri Bey, the mutesarif of Kirkuk, were also implicated in these killings.⁵²

In March 1917, when the British took Baghdad, several thousand Armenians were eking out an existence between Mosul and Basra, scattered here and there in the countryside or the towns. Patriarch Zaven, who went to Mosul shortly before the British captured the city, saw Armenian women (from Erzerum in particular) and children begging in the streets. With the help of donations received from the catholicos, Sahag Khabayan, he was able to ease their lot and to feed and clothe them. Although the Chaldeans did not provide him with the least assistance, the patriarch notes that the Jacobite Syriacs went so far as to put their churches at the deportees’ disposal. Zaven also points to the active role that the police chief, Mehmed Halid, a converted Armenian, played in the relief operations for the Armenians of Mosul.⁵³ He further observes that the Yezidi population showed the deportees kindness and that a Yezidi sheikh, Ýsmail Bey, regularly came to see him during his stay in Mosul; he adds that the Yezidis of Sinjar took in and protected many Armenians.⁵⁴ Finally, the patriarch notes that 50 to 60 men who had so far managed to survive in Mosul were rounded up in a raid and assigned to an amele taburi working on road construction. The deportees in the best situation were women from Erzerum and Siirt employed as servants by German and Austrian officers or local government officials.⁵⁵

Shortly after Baghdad was captured in March 1917, Hali Pasha arrived with his general staff. He was soon followed by Cevdet, who had been named commander of the area in June.⁵⁶ The two men, who had already collaborated closely in extirpating the Armenians of the vilayet of Bitlis, seem to have been reunited in order to carry out a new operation of the same kind. According to information revealed during the April 1919 trial of Nevzâde Bey, a former military commander, immediately upon arrived in the area, Halil had launched a fierce repression campaign aimed not only at Armenian deportees, but also at Jewish and Kurdish refugees living in Mosul. On the evidence given by several officers, he had inaugurated the campaign by having five Jews hanged; their bodies were then thrown into the Tigris. Colonel Abdülkadri Hilmi Bey is also supposed to have directed fierce attacks on Armenian deportees in the Zakho gorge, located further to the north.⁵⁷

The most important of the criminals brought to trial was Nevzâde Bey, a former CUP fedayi who according to chief prosecutor Reşad Bey had committed several political murders. He was charged with having organized the massacre of the deportees in Mosul, “where he last found himself,” as well as that of the Armenian soldiers in a labor battalion.⁵⁸ On Şerif Bey’s testimony, the dragoman of Mosul’s military governor, Nevzâde, who “was Halil’s favorite,” made a fortune by pillaging the deportees before “exiling them to a remote place” and also by imprisoning several merchants from the city who were “dreadfully” tortured every night. A second witness, an officer by the name of Bekir Bey, told the court that Nevzâde was notorious in Mosul for the atrocities to which he had subjected “thousands of Kurds who had emigrated from Bitlis and Erzerum. He cut off their food supply, condemning them to starve to death.” Be it added that the accused did not protest when the presiding judge of the court asked if it was true that, acting in concert with Halil Pasha, he had confiscated all food supplies arriving in the city and sold them for personal gain, dividing the profits up with Halil.”⁵⁹ In other words, Halil, who was obviously in command of these operations, did not limit himself to attacking Armenian deportees, but also initiated a policy of eliminating Kurds, inspired by the “Turkism” of which he was a partisan.

This repressive campaign peaked in September 1917, when Halil ordered his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant-Colonel Basri Bey, to proceed to massacre the Armenian deportees scattered throughout the Mosul region.⁶⁰ Cevdet was apparently also deeply involved in this new liquidation campaign, which began on 11 September 1917.⁶¹ According to reports gathered by the Swiss historian S. Zurlinden as the events were unfolding, Halil had 15,000 Armenians killed in two nights by Kurds and irregulars; they were tied together in groups of ten and thrown into the Tigris.⁶² These details remind us that Halil, although he had donned a military uniform, was still working for the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.

The Patriarch, Zaven Yeghiayan, who was held under house arrest in Baghdad from 9 October 1916 to early March 1917, notes that a few Armenian notables from Baghdad were deported to Ras ul-Ayn and Der Zor in summer 1915, but that they were able to go back home a few weeks later thanks to the intercession of Der Goltz. According to the patriarch, the arrival of Ali Suad Bey as vali of Baghdad – he was replaced in Der Zor by Salih Zeki – in early summer 1916 alleviated the suffering of the city’s Armenians.⁶³

Chapter 4

The Camps in Suruc, Arabpunar, and Ras ul-Ayn and the Zones of Relegation in the Vilayet of Mosul