The Ottoman Armenian concentration camps in Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and Ras al-Ayn
When the Armenian Genocide is denied, we are often told it was “resettlement/relocation” and not “extermination”.
The concentration camps set up by the Ottomans in the Syrian Desert, however, tell another story entirely.
Deportation routes/death camps during the Armenian Genocide
For some context:
As the Ottoman Empire was gradually falling apart, massacres against minorities, including Armenians, were taking place. The Hamidian massacres of 1893–1896 and Adana massacre of 1909 were the first significant examples of Armenian massacres, setting the stage for the Armenian Genocide.
In the months leading up to the deportations to the death camps, Armenians were also vilified and scapegoated, similar to what German Jews underwent in the prelude to the Holocaust.
Ottoman propaganda described Armenians as “traitors, saboteurs, spies, conspirators, vermin, and infidels”.
At a meeting of the Committee of Union and Progress in February 1915, Nazım Bey argued that “It is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so that there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished.”
The party “envisioned the Armenian as an invasive infection in Muslim Turkish society”, and CUP propagandist Ziya Gökalp promoted the idea that “Turkey could only be revitalized if it rid itself of its non-Muslim elements”.
This incitement to genocide led directly to the murder of over a million Armenians.
After this, the Ottoman authorities began a wide-scale crackdown on several Armenian intellectuals starting on the 24th of April 1915, which eventually lead to their deportations to various areas of Anatolia, as well as parts of Syria. Approximately 235–270 people in total were deported.
This is usually referred to as “Red Sunday” and is the anniversary of the date on which the Armenian Genocide is commemorated.
Armenian intellectuals deported in 1915
One example of the deportations to the camps in Deir ez-Zor can be seen with the case of Mihran Aghasyan, an Armenian poet/musician, who was deported from his hometown of Edirne straight to Deir ez-Zor, and sadly, he died there the next year.
However, this was only the beginning of the bloodbath in the Syrian desert.
As of 15 September 1915, the Turkish interior minister, Talaat Pasha, cabled the following orders to his prefect in Aleppo:
“You have already been informed that the Government…has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey…
Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience.”
Other such orders have been recently uncovered in Jerusalem, too.
Lost evidence was recently recovered in a Jerusalem archive that researchers have called “smoking gun” proof of the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, came upon an original telegram from the military tribunals that initially convicted the genocide’s planners. This key evidence has long been missing, and the lack of original documents, the Times said, is the foundation of the Turkish narrative of denying the genocide.
“Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,” Akcam told the Times. “This is the smoking gun.”
The telegram, in code, is from Behaeddin Shakir, a high-ranking Ottoman official, to a colleague, inquiring about specifics regarding the deportation and murder of Armenians in eastern Anatolia. A copy of this telegram was used in Shakir’s conviction, shortly before almost all original documents and testimony went missing, forcing scholars to rely on secondary sources for their research on the topic.
According to the Times, Armenian leadership in Istanbul shipped 24 boxes of records to England when Turkish nationalists were seizing control of the country in 1922. The documents then made their way to France in the care of a bishop and finally to the archive of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, where they’ve remained since the 1930s, inaccessible to scholars “for reasons that are not entirely clear.”
Lost evidence of Armenian Genocide discovered in Jerusalem archive
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And then, the deportation and mass murder started.
Armenians were taken on death marches southwards from Anatolia, into the harsh and unforgiving conditions of the Syrian desert. The Ottoman authorities deliberately withheld food and water from Armenian detainees, and this lead to many thousands of deaths, before they even reached the camps!
“The witnesses have seen thousands of deported Armenians under tents in the open, in caravans on the march, descending the river in boats and in all phases of their miserable life.
Only in a few places does the Government issue any rations, and those are quite insufficient. The people, therefore, themselves are forced to satisfy their hunger with food begged in that scanty land or found in the parched fields.
Naturally, the death rate from starvation and sickness is very high and is increased by the brutal treatment of the authorities, whose bearing toward the exiles as they are being driven back and forth over the desert is not unlike that of slave drivers.
With few exceptions, no shelter of any kind is provided and the people coming from a cold climate are left under the scorching desert sun without food and water. Temporary relief can only be obtained by the few able to pay officials.”
Armenian death march through the Syrian Desert
Where the death marches terminated in Raqqa, the survivors were drowned in the Euphrates, meeting a watery end after the deserts of Mesopotamia.
“Raqqa, in northern Syria, is infamous for being the former headquarters of the ISIS caliphate. Now a few hours drive south of the Turkish border, it was here, in 1915 that survivors of the Armenian massacres were first encountered by Arab Bedouins. They stumbled out of the desert, skin and bone, close to starvation, having been forced into a death march by the Ottoman authorities. Most didn’t make it, raped and tortured, their bodies thrown in the Euphrates.”
Conditions elsewhere were no better, either, with more starvation, overcrowding, and mass murder. Deir ez-Zor alone saw 150,000 casualties within 2 years, not to mention those killed in Ras al-Ayn, Mosul and the environs!
During the early period of massacres, 30,000 Armenians were encamped in various camps outside the town of Deir ez-Zor. They were under the protection of the Arab governor, Ali Suad Bey, until the Ottoman authorities decided to replace him with Salih Zeki Bey, who was known for his cruelty and barbarity.
When the refugees, including women and children, reached Deir ez-Zor, they cooked grass…[and] ate dead birds.
According to Minority Rights Group,
Those who survived the long journey south were herded into huge open-air concentration camps, the grimmest of which was Deir-ez-Zor… where they were starved and killed by sadistic guards. A small number escaped through the secret protection of friendly Arabs from villages in Northern Syria.
“For Armenians, Der Zor has come to have a meaning approximate to Auschwitz. Each, in different ways, an epicenter of death and a systematic process of mass-killing; each a symbolic place, an epigrammatic name on a dark map. Der Zor is a term that sticks with you, or sticks on you, like a burr or thorn: “r” “z” “or” — hard, sawing, knifelike. Der Zor: A place to which hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 and 1916 were forced to march, a final destination in the genocide of the Armenians carried out by the Ottoman Turkish government under the cover of World War I.”
Within the Ras al-Ayn camp specifically, unthinkable human rights violations took place, such as rape/sexual assault, as well as sporadic massacres, cutting thousands of lives far too short.
“Two Arab officers informed the British of the massacres secretly ordered in Ras al-Ayn, where some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardianship of hundreds of Kurds…These Kurds always returned after 3 or 4 days of absence on such expeditions…Two sayings were common among the common soldiers: “Ras ul-Ain is a shambles” and “No man can ever think of woman’s body except as a matter of horror instead of attraction, after Ras ul-Ain.”
“They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else” A History of the Armenian Genocide
Concentration camp, Ras al-Ayn
As well, people were intentionally disfigured, and theft of personal belongings (or what was left of them) was actively encouraged!
According to reports, in one day alone 300–400 women arrived to the camps completely naked and were plundered by local Chechens and gendarmerie: “All the bodies, without exception, were entirely naked and the wounds that had been inflicted showed that the victims had been killed, after having been subjected to unspeakable brutalities”.
“There was nothing wrong in robbing and killing deportees’, as the local kaimakam (governor) had ordered to massacre the deported Armenians. Daurri (Diirri) Bey, son of Turkish Defterdar Djemal Bey of Aleppo, was the official High Executioner of the Armenians at Ras-el-Ain. “This brute, after robbing them of their jewelry chose the youngest girls of good families and kept them for a harem.
“While we were marching the Turkish soldiers with drawn swords suddenly made their way through the crowd, and, like beasts let loose in a flock of sheep, killed and wounded many. The rest still dragged on under the influence of the bloody swords until Ras-ul-Ain. Desert was reached. This place was especially noted for the carrying of their butchery, for all that were sent to these parts were sent there to die.”, wrote an eyewitness. “Armenian Tells Of Death Pilgrimage”, New York Times, July 27, 1919
Several times, entire camps in Ras ul-Ayn were liquidated as a persecution against typhoid epidemics.
According to US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr., all the way to Ras-ul-Ain the existence of wretched Armenian travellers “was one prolonged horror”.
Even today, evidence of such horrors can be seen, as the remains of Armenians who died during the Genocide can be found all over Syria!
Bones of Armenians are commonplace in the soils of Syria, mass graves having been the norm after massacres. Farmers often dig up bones of Armenians in their fields, and the Armenian Genocide memorial in Margadeh even has an exhibit dedicated to the bones of those martyred in the Genocide.
Margadeh chapel, near Deir ez-Zor
Armenian bones, Ras al-Ayn
So, in short, it’s impossible to deny the existence of death camps in Ar-Raqqah, Deir ez-Zor, and Ras al-Ayn, as is evident with the marches into the Syrian desert in subhuman conditions, the remains of the dead who perished along the way, and the thousands killed in the extermination camps, disguised as “resettlement” by the Ottomans.
The mass murder of Ottoman Armenians will never be forgotten. If it takes 100, 200, even 500 more years, the truth will one day come out in full, and Turkey will be held responsible for the bloodbath of 1915.
