136 ISLAM AT WAR
Turkish government issued a proclamation declaring all males ages twenty
to forty-five conscripted into the Turkish army. This decree included the
Armenians. On September 30, 1914, local officials of the Turkish gov-
ernment issued arms to the Muslim residents of the town of Keghi, in
Erzerum province. The pretext given was that the Armenian population
in the region was unreliable. The existence of nationalistic Armenian so-
cieties, the historical advance of Russian armies into the Transcaucasus,
and the support of those armies by the indigenous Armenians roused Turk-
ish paranoia to extremes.
There began a series of repressive measures by the Turks against the
Armenians, and as the military situation grew worse, the Turks became
more and more concerned. Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were
disarmed and sent to work as laborers. Turks massacred these unarmed
Armenian soldiers. This needs to be seen, however, in the light of the
numbers of Armenians serving in the Russian army and ostensibly fighting
for a free Armenia.
In December 1914 a series of isolated murders began to terrorize the
Armenian population. Fear began spreading through Armenians and other
minorities in the Caucasus. Turkish and Kurdish soldiers under Halil Pa-
sha attacked Armenian villages in northwestern Persia on January 8, 1915.
More than 18,000 Armenians, as well as numerous Assyrian and Persian
Muslims fled to the Caucasus to escape the predations of Halil Pasha’s
men.
In February 1915, plagued by fears of Armenian fifth-columnists in the
rear, the vice-governor of Mush ordered seventy gendarmes (military po-
lice) to kill the Armenian Dashnak leader Rupen and all persons found
with him. Rupen and his followers escaped.
On April 1, 1915, the first mass arrest of Armenian political leaders
occurred and by mid-April Turkish troops began to destroy villages in the
Van province. More than 24,000 Armenians were reportedly killed in three
days. A general deportation of Armenians from the region began and
25,000 were deported from Zeitun. Round-ups began of Armenian intel-
lectuals and community leaders in Istanbul, and the first large-scale mas-
sacre occurred in Kharput on June 23. By early August about 230,000
Armenian deportees arrived in Aleppo. Extermination camps were reput-
edly established, and by October 7, 1915, 800,000 Armenians are said to
have been massacred. Sadly, these figures are unverifiable and subject to
debate.
On October 4, 1915, Theobald von Bethman-Hollweg, the German
chancellor, received a message from ambassador Wilhelm Radowitz ad-
vising him that of the 2,000,000 Armenians in Turkey before the war,