by Benny Morris
months of countless locals and northern deportees to the camps and the desert
beyond. Forced to depart, Jackson entrusted refugee relief to Emil Zollinger,
a Swiss businessman and philanthropist.135
Because Aleppo’s native Armenians lived relatively close to the Syrian
Desert, and so did not have far to march, and because some of the vilayet’s
governors and consuls were active in protecting them, they fared well com-
pared to Armenians from other vilayets. Of 37,000 prewar Armenians, almost
14,000 survived in the vilayet itself and almost 20,000 elsewhere in Syria, ac-
cording to Talât’s 1917 estimates. Moreover, another 24,000 Armenians
from other vilayets managed to endure in Aleppo vilayet.136 However, many
of them were later sent to Deir Zor, where they may have perished after Talât’s staff assembled these statistics.
Deir Zor and Rās al-’Ayn
From the start of mass deportations in 1915, Deir Zor was a major refugee
destination. By August 1915, 15,000 Armenians had reached the town, and
thousands more were living in makeshift camps nearby.137
We do not know if the architects of the second phase of the Armenian Geno-
cide also designated Deir Zor from the beginning as the final site of liquida-
tion, but they clearly did not intend that deportees who reached the town
should form a community there. Little preparation had been made for their
arrival; the situation was so desperate that, according to Jackson, parents some-
times had to sell children to keep their siblings alive.138 Indeed, the central
government took active mea sures to prevent any sort of regrouping at Deir
Zor. For instance, on July 24, the Security Directorate warned the mutessarif,
Ali Suat Bey, that Armenian Catholicos Sahag and his companion Eczaci
(Ejzaji) Serkis were on the way to the region: under no circumstances should
they be allowed to make contact with the deportees. Instead these clerics were
to be ordered to return to Aleppo.139
The Western River, and Downstream
After the war, Jackson summed up the situation in late summer 1915: “The
daily departure of convoys of Armenians, re- deported from the encampments
at Aleppo, as well as many thousands that were sent direct from the interior,
fi nally numbered about 60,000 collected at Deir el- Zor.” There, “for about
a year they were as well taken care of as pos si ble with the limited means”
at Suat’s disposal. He did what he could to settle deportees on farmland,
build makeshift homes, and provide food, clothing, and medical assistance.
Constantinople asked him repeatedly “to make other disposition of them,”
Jackson wrote, referring to the deportees. But Suat pretended not to under-
stand the government’s intentions.140 He prob ably was also aware of the
Jackson- Rohner network supplying the Deir Zor deportees and may have
secretly supported it.141
Suat was also in charge of the camp in Rās al-’Ayn, more than a hundred
miles to the north, where he allowed some of the deportees to move into town
and open small businesses. For a while, some Armenians believed they would
be able to build new lives under Suat’s protection.142 Even Morgenthau, who
always suspected that the purpose of the deportations was annihilation, had
momentary pangs of optimism. In a letter to his wife, he wrote that he “was
surprised to hear that the Armenians at Zor were fairly well satisfied; that they had already settled down there and were earning their living.”143
But even under Suat’s relatively benign rule, the death rate was appalling.
A German officer who visited Deir Zor in what was most likely late Oc-
tober 1915 learned from a local doctor that, with mounting hunger and
plague, 150 to 200 people were dying each day. “No linguistic expression of
thought can even come close to describing the real ity of this human misery,”
the officer wrote. “And this tragic heap is continually building up. . . .
Hundreds of unburied corpses, dragged off, then lie further away!”144 There
was only so much a conscientious local official could do, given the state of the
arrivals. In a September letter, a German railway engineer described seeing
in Rās al-’Ayn “a transport of 200 girls and women” who “arrived . . .
completely naked: Shoes, shirts, in short: every thing had been taken from
them and they were left to travel naked for four days under the burning
sun—40 degrees [Centigrade] in the shade— mocked at and derided by the
soldiers accompanying them . . . . ‘We have been given strict orders by the
government to treat you in this manner,” officials back home had told them.145
The Young Turk s
As bad as things had gotten in late summer, in early November, the flow of
arrivals increased further. The government realized that some of the deportees
sent to Aleppo, perhaps emboldened by Cemal Pasha’s relatively lenient treat-
ment, had found ways to continue to Damascus and other Syrian towns. So
the Interior Ministry ordered that deportations to Aleppo cease.146 Instead
convoys were to be sent eastward using two direct routes: one, along the
Euphrates, to Deir Zor, the other to Rās al-’Ayn and Mosul, via the Baghdad
Railway.147
As the pressure on Deir Zor increased, Suat Bey could no longer avoid ac-
knowledging instructions. The postwar court- martials reveal that Talât even-
tually had enough, sending Suat a destroy- after- reading tele gram demanding
that he comply with orders.148 Suat then sought to placate Constantinople by
adhering to its overt instruction to ensure that Armenians did not comprise
more than 10 percent of the Deir Zor area’s population.149 When, in early
1916, this proportion was exceeded, he sent two large convoys to Mosul. He
still did not take deportation to mean massacre. According to the German
consul in Mosul, the convoys reached the town. Jackson, who was sure the
convoys would not make Mosul, was pleasantly surprised by the survival rate.150
Later convoys would not be so lucky. In June 1916 the Interior Ministry,
tired of Suat’s guileful re sis tance, sent him packing to Baghdad, an area
almost uninvolved in the genocide. His replacement was Salih Zeki, who as
kaymakam of Everek, in Kayseri vilayet, had efficiently and brutally rid his
territory of Armenians. This was likely one outcome of February 1916 discus-
sions in Constantinople. At the time Talât estimated that more than 200,000
Armenians were still alive in northern Syria, a number that worried him
greatly and led to redoubled extermination efforts.151 But the CUP leader-
ship feared that a heightened proj ect of murder in Aleppo vilayet would
leak out via the American consulate. Enver and Talât knew that Jackson was
keeping tabs and reporting to the State Department. Hence another prob-
able outcome of the meetings: that same month, Enver ordered Jackson to
deliver all the consulate’s mail “unsealed to the post office authorities, to be
read and censored by the Turkish military officials.”152
The final chapter of this stage of the genocide, marked by mass murder
along the Euphrates, began shortly after the February discussions. In March
the governmen
t officially announced an end to deportations, no doubt to re-
The Western River, and Downstream
A pile of bodies in the desert. In spring and summer 1916, the Turks and their
helpers— Kurds, Circassians, Chechens, and Arabs— systematically murdered many
of the Armenian deportees who had reached the Deir Zor area of northeastern Syria.
lieve American, and possibly German, pressure.153 But immediately afterward,
secret instructions went out rescinding that announcement.154 By April 6
Rössler was reporting that, in just a few days, Circassians and others had mas-
sacred most of “the unarmed 14,000 inmates” of the Armenian camp in Rās
al-’Ayn.155 Each day 300–500 inmates were taken out and killed six miles from
the camp and their bodies thrown into the Euphrates. The kaymakam in
charge calmly told a querying Turkish officer that he was “acting on orders.”156
After the killings, a group of Circassians plaited a rope twenty- five yards long
from the hair of young women they had killed and sent it as a pres ent to their
commander, Pirinççioğlu Feyzi, the parliamentary deputy of Diyarbekir.157
So committed was Zeki to the annihilation plan that he carried it out even
over the objections of army commanders. In June 1916 the Turkish military
was planning Operation Yıldırım, an effort to block the British advance in
Iraq. The army recruited several thousand Armenians to help build rafts for
use on the Euphrates, a critical component of the operation. But Zeki refused
The Young Turk s
to allow the recruits to join the troops. Instead he sent the recruits off with
their families to be murdered on the way to Marrat, a few hours walk south.
Unable to rely on the army, Zeki remobilized bands of brigands and or ga nized
new ones, comprising Circassians, Kurds, and Chechens from the Rās al-’Ayn
area and some local Bedouin Arabs. They did their dirty work in sparsely
populated areas at the confluence of the Khabour and Euphrates rivers.158
At the beginning of July, the government began concentrating survivors in
Deir Zor. Talât instructed Aleppo to send any remaining deportees there.159
In addition, all deportees previously resettled in Muslim areas of Mosul were
ordered back to Deir Zor.160 From there they were rounded up in groups of
thousands and sent across the river southward, with no water or provisions,
to expire from thirst and illness.161 “A hopeless wandering took place,” Rohner
wrote.162
Most of them suffered a fate similar to the Armenian recruits assigned to
support Operation Yıldırım. They were told that they were being sent for
resettlement at Mosul or to the camp at Marrat. But at Marrat, or at the
Khabour River crossing, gendarmes broke the big convoys into smaller groups
and handed the refugees over to brigands, who separated the men, robbed
those who still carried money or valuables, and killed them.163 Twenty such
The Syrian Desert, Where the Deportees Were Murdered En Masse, in 1916
Malatya
Gölcük lake (Hazar Golu)
Van
Zeytun
N
Gügen Boğaz
Siirt
Lake
Kahramanmaras
Diyarbekir
Urmia
Şeytan Dere
Hakkari
Adana
Osmaniye Gaziantep
Mardin
Midyat
Iskenderun
Urfa
Ti
Ras al-Ayn
g
Musadağ
ris
Al Bab
Ar Raqqah
Mosul
Antakya
Aleppo
E
Maskanah
Ash Shaddadi
uphra
Deir ez-Zur
te Al Suwar
s
Marrat
Abu Hamam
Beirut
Damascus
0
100
200
300
Mass kill zone
KM
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convoys were dispatched from Deir Zor, the first leaving the town on July 15.
In the final stage of the killing, later in 1916, those remaining were mostly
women and children; they were starved for a while and then handed over to
Bedouin tribesmen to finish the job. Often they were killed near Suvar (al-
Suwwar).164 Sometimes, though, they were taken down the Euphrates as
far as Abu Hamam, more than fifty miles south of Deir Zor. One eyewitness
described the scene at the Abu Hamam camp:
The people fight for the blood of slaughtered animals which is poured
out onto the ground, they nibble at bones they find on manure heaps,
they search through horse manure in the hope of finding a few grains of
barley and devour them ravenously. They eat the flesh of animals and
humans who have died by the wayside. Many of them who cannot stand
it any longer throw themselves in the Euphrates, taking their children
with them.165
Those who managed to survive were driven deeper into the Khabour valley,
toward the village of Sheddadiye (al- Shaddadi), “where they were, as a rule,
killed behind the hill that looked down on this Arab village.”166
While more and more Armenians were dispatched from Deir Zor to their
deaths, still others were left in the camps awaiting their fates. They left few testimonies on which to draw, but witnesses pass down to us the trauma experi-
enced merely observing their plight. One of these witnesses was August
Bernau, a German employee of the American Vacuum Oil com pany, who lived
in Syria and took over Rohner’s Aleppo- based clandestine operation after it
was compromised. In August, under the pretext of collecting debts, he distrib-
uted financial aid to deportees at Deir Zor. “What I have seen surpasses all
imagination,” he wrote. “To speak of ‘a thousand horrors’ is too little. . . . I believed I was passing through a corner of hell.” He predicted that all the Arme-
nians in the region would soon be dead.167 At Meskene (Maskanah), another
area along the river, one of Jackson’s aides reported seeing more than 150 long
mounds, in each of which 100 to 300 bodies were buried, and that similar evi-
dence of killing could be found at other points along the river route.168
Occasionally Zeki was spotted watching and encouraging killings.169 He
worked diligently to clear Deir Zor. Each day, criers announced that new
The Young Turk s
places of settlement had been found for deportees still in town, and that
they should leave when called. As they assembled on one side of the Euphrates
Bridge, brigands gathered on the other. Only Armenian women taken as
wives or domestics by local Arabs— one per family— were allowed to stay in
the city.170 In September Jackson reported, “The Mutessarif of Der- el- Zor
has arranged and carried out the massacre of all the remaining Armenians
that were there, some 12,000 in all, having gone personally to superintend
the work.” Jackson added, “Before the end, all the presentable women and
girls were outraged” by men “whose participation was at the invitation or
command of the Mutessarif.”171
According to Talât’s statistics, there we
re 63,000 Armenians in Deir Zor
in 1914. In 1917 he found that there were 1,771, a figure later amended, with
no explanation, to 6,778.172 In this case, perhaps more than in any other, the
numbers do not tell the story. Between 1915 and 1917, hundreds of thousands
were marched to this forlorn destination and vanished in the sand. Yves Ternon
suggests that from summer 1915 to the end of the war, about 350,000 people
perished in the area.173 Aram Andonian puts the number of murders during
just the five worst months of 1916 at 192,750. The indictment of the Young
Turk leadership at the postwar court- martial spoke of 195,750 killed.174
At the end of 1916, with his work done, Salih Zeki was recalled to Con-
stantinople. Apparently he arrived at the capital with coin- filled coffers. Im-
mediately after the Ottomans signed the Armistice of Mudros, which ended
hostilities with the Allies on October 30, 1918, he went into hiding. He was
tried in absentia at the court- martial, convicted, and on April 28, 1920, sen-
tenced to death. The judgment held that Zeki
Or ga nized mounted and marching gangs from among those who had
brought over the deported Armenians from vari ous parts of the realm.
In his presence, they pounced on the victims who were once again forced
to march under the pretext of further deportations, and robbed. . . .
Many were murdered and massacred along the Habur basin. . . . Many
witnesses, Muslims and non- Muslims, testified [to this] under oath.
Based on the evidence in (descending) order of gravity: the testimonies;
the contents of investigation reports; the fact that the defendant is on the
run; and [other] legal clues, we have concluded, with a clear conscience,
The Western River, and Downstream
that the charges have been sufficiently proven. We have therefore found
Zeki Bey guilty of . . . robbing and looting and murdering, and . . . he
is to be executed and his property seized.
The punishment was never carried out. Instead Zeki continued to enjoy a life
of influence in Turkish politics, later resurfacing as a founder of the country’s Communist Party.175
6
A Policy of Genocide
There is no question that the deportation of the Armenians was planned and
