Late Ottoman Genocides

The late Ottoman genocides is the historiographical framework treating the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides, carried out by the Ottoman government and its successor Young Turk-led authorities between the 1910s and early 1920s, as a single coordinated campaign against the empire's Christian minorities rather than as unconnected episodes. Ottoman authorities forcibly deported and killed large portions of the Armenian and Assyrian populations of Anatolia and Mesopotamia during the First World War, through mass killings, death marches and starvation, with the Assyrian episode known as Sayfo lasting from 1914 to 1924. Scholars who support the combined framework, including historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi, argue the killings shared organization, personnel and ideological motivation under the Committee of Union and Progress. Other historians caution the framework risks obscuring Ottoman violence against non-Christian populations, particularly Kurdish Muslims, in the same period. The Armenian and Assyrian genocides remain the two cases most consistently grouped under this label.