t his anger on his Armenian subjects in a murderous rampage carried out by cavalry troops in Anatolia in central Turkey. Armenians then inhabited six provinces, and in the six the troops of the sultan slaughtered and ravaged the unarmed population and pillaged its property. News of this event was slow to reach the West, but it was eventually established as true largely through the efforts of American and German missionaries, who reported that some 200,000 Armenians had been killed. Ten years later the sultan was deposed by a political party that came to be known as the Young Turks, and these were reformers who wanted to erase the dreadful image of Turkey that existed in the Western world. They created a constitution that granted freedom and equal rights to all minorities, including the Armenians, but they soon betrayed their principles by scuttling their own reforms. Under cover of World War I, in which they were allied with Germany, they began a systematic campaign of carnage even more cruel than that of Abdul Hamid. This started in April 1915 as Talaat Pasha, the leading figure in the Young Turk government, issued a series of decrees ordering the deportation of every Armenian man, woman, and child from Anatolia to the desert areas of Syria and Mesopotamia some 300 miles away. While the word "deportation" was used, it was soon apparent that the word was synonymous with "death" as most of the Armenian men were taken outside their villages and shot or killed with sabers and axes. The women, children, and elderly were herded into caravans extending for miles in month-long marches to the southern deserts.
The Armenians in World War I had given assistance to Russia once Russia invaded that region, for the Armenians saw the Russians as liberators and allies. This was used as an excuse for the Turkish government to attack the Armenians with the claim that a generalized revolt of the Armenians was imminent. The massacred that fol...