Page "Armenians" Paragraph 18

The ethnic cleansing of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire is widely considered a genocide, an estimated 1. 5 million victims, with one wave of persecution in the years 1894 to 1896 culminating in the events of the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and 1916.

With World War I in progress, the Turks accused the ( Christian ) Armenians as liable to ally with Imperial Russia, and used it as a pretext to deal with the entire Armenian population as an enemy within their empire.